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THE
RISE OF
AMERICAN
CIVILIZATION

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS
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THE RISE OF
AMERICAN
CIVI LIZATI ON
~ CHARLESABEARD (.
G? MARY R:‘BEARD

Decorations by
WILFRED JONES

VOLUME I
“The
Agricultural
Era
1027

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY:NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
SET UP AND ELECTROTYPED. PUBLISHED APRIL, 1927
REPRINTED MAY, JUNE, NOVEMBER, 1927.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE BERWICK & SMITH CO,

Contents

CHAPTES
Ti EENGUAND $i COLONTAD SECRET) aie che) ec anh eins

II AYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE OF THE THIRTEEN
EM COLONIES || oh) oi nit uemiia neni cr Te )5),\) 6, lsu ae

III * THe GrowTx or Economic anp Pouiticat Power .

IV PROVINCIAL AMBRICA. 6) yee foc iia
V Tue CiasH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY . . .
VI INDEPENDENCE AND GAVIL)\ CONFLICT Wouiveve fet Vue ore
VII PoPuLisM AND REACTION | 6) 1G RON IMO Laan,
VIII Tue RIsE OF NATIONAL PARTIES (03) ach oun ani eis
IX: AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM AND THE BALANCE OF
POWER UUD HENS aR RHO ail. 's: ue Mees a

x Tur Younc IEP UBLIG’ gil Weal: s:,\Le ua Ree TA elu s

Al New AcricurtuRAL STATES’... 60 ee oe

XII JacKsonran DemMocracy—A TRIUMPHANT FARMER-
PABOR ME ART OM CAN ela lel ioe an tamMRMMNe! 24a MAR

ay
ALPE) VV EST WARD TOMEH EY LACIFIC | 000 geile ik) ean
XIV Tur SWEEP OF Economic Forcks. . .. . e
XV Tue Po.itics oF THE Economic Drirr. .. .

‘
XVI Democracy: RoMANTIC AND REALISTIC. . . «

PAGE —

122

228
297

391
437
507

542
581
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663

725

THE
RISE OF
AMERICAN
CIVILIZATION

THE
AGRICULTURAL
ERA

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THE RISE OF |
AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I

England's Colonial Secret

HE discovery, settlement, and expansion of America

form merely one phase in the long and restless
movement of mankind on the surface of the earth.

When the curtain of authentic history first rose on the
human scene, tribes, war bands, and armies had already
seared plains and valleys with their trails and roads and
launched their boats on the trackless seas. Wiewed from a
high point in time, the drama of the races seems to be little
more than a record of migrations and shifting civilizations,
with their far-reaching empires—Babylonian, Egyptian,
Persian, Abyssinian, Athenian, Roman, Mongol, Turkish,

3

4 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and Manchu—as fleeting periods of apparent pause and
concentration in the universal flow of things.

It was not without some warrant, perhaps, that one of
the very earliest Greek philosophers, Anaximander, more
than five centuries before the Christian era, reached the
startling conclusion that the cosmos which he beheld with
penetrating eyes was a limitless flood, ever in motion, throw-
ing up new forms and beings and drawing them again into
its devouring immensity according to the law of destiny
—whirling worlds, swaying tides, growing crops, wander-
ing herds, puny man, and his little systems erected proudly
for a day against eternity being but symbols of an unchang-
ing force, the essence of all reality. Conceived even in
terms of modern mathematics, a purely mechanistic phi-
losophy is engaging in its simplicity, but we are warned by
one recent historian, Henry Adams, that mere motion can-
not account for direction or for the problems of vital en-
ergy; and by another, Oswald Spengler, that “there'is an
organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all exist-
ence, as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of
understanding and of things understood—a logic of direc-
tion as against a logic of extension.”

More than two thousand years after Anaximander, in
the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, Hegel,
seeking the solution to the endless changes of history, came
to the conclusion that the evolution of humanity was, in
its inmost nature, the progressive revelation of the divine
spirit. Assuming, as necessary, God the unconditioned,
creator and upholder of all, Hegel saw in the kaleidoscopic
time-patterns of civilization, strewn through the ages, mere
partial reflections of the grand Idea underlying the uni-
verse—‘‘an infinite power realizing its aim in the absolute
rational design of the world.” Nations rising and declin-
ing were to him but pawns in a majestic game, each with
its mission to fulfill, with its heroes as servants of their
epochs carrying out that aspect of the Idea then fated for
realization.

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 5

And according to this philosopher, the chosen method
of the Absolute was movement by thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis: every system, every concept, every situation call-
ing forth from the vasty deep its opposite, its challenge;
the conflict of the two finally reaching a reconciling synthesis
or solution. Though logic would seem to imply that
change must be unbroken in the future as in the past, Hegel
in fact announced that the goal of the long process had
been reached in Germany and the Prussian monarchy: God
had labored through the centuries to produce the ideal
situation in which Hegel found himself. But that naive
conviction did not prevent his great hypothesis from affect-
ing deeply the thought of the modern age. If historians,
working with concepts less ambitious—with concrete rela-
tions rather than with ultimates—have been inclined in
recent days to avoid the Hegelian creed, theologians and
statesmen have continued to the latest hour to find in it the
weight of telling argument.

Near the close of Hegel’s century, a German economist,
Werner Sombart, seeking the dynamic of imperialism, re-
duced the process to the terms of an everlasting struggle
among human societies over feeding places on the wide
surface of the earth and over the distribution of the world’s
natural resources. While this doctrine is too sweeping in
its universality, it is not without illustrations. For three
thousand years or more the clash of ancient races and em-
pire builders had, as its goal, possession of the rich val-
leys of the Nile and the Euphrates, where food for con-
gested populations could be won with ease and ruling
classes could be readily founded on servile labor. Every
one of the strong empires that rose in those fertile regions
and enjoyed a respite of security was in turn overwhelmed
by a conquering horde which coveted its land and its accu-
mulated wealth. The spoils of industry were the rewards
of valor. When the Athenian empire was at its height,
no fewer than a thousand cities paid tribute to its treas-
ury and a lucrative commerce, spread over the Mediterra-

6 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

nean, swelled the opulence of its merchants. The age of
Pericles had its price. The Carthaginian empire, embrac-
ing in its conquered area Northern Africa, Southern Spain,
Corsica, Sardinia and half of Sicily, was first and foremost
a trading state dominated by the idea of gathering from
its subject provinces every particle of wealth that could be
wrested from them by arms or squeezed out of them by
monopoly.

Before the sword of Rome rich Carthage fell. When
the two powers came face to face on the soil of Sicily, it was
the hope of gain as well as fear of death that carried the
vote for war in the Roman assembly. For this we have the
authority of Polybius: ‘The military men told the people
that they would get important material benefits from it.”
In this simple flash is revealed the powerful passion that
drove the armies of the Republic beyond the borders of
Italy and at length in many centuries of almost ceaseless
aggression extended the empire of Rome to the sands of
Arabia and to the snows of Scotland. Perhaps, as that
modern pro-consul, Lord Curzon, has said by way of justifi-
cation, the dominant motive was a search for ‘‘defensible
frontiers’—something not yet found by any military com-
mander anywhere on the globe. Still the noble lord had to
confess in the same breath that Rome, having conquered
a world, regarded her provinces ‘‘solely from the point
of view of revenue.” Varus, who was sent out a poor man
to govern Syria, amassed a million in two years.

When Rome had grasped more than she could defend,
her fair cities and fertile fields became spoils of victory
for the German barbarians that had long beaten against
her borders. For two hundred years at least the civiliza-
tion of the Mediterranean world was at the mercy of
migratory Teutons. Finally there were no more Roman
provinces to seize; then feudal war lords employed their
acquisitive talents for the next thousand years in fighting
one another over manors and towns, pausing occa-
sionally to unite against the Moslem, who threatened them

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 7

all with destruction. When, eventually, out of this strug-
gle emerged five states—Spain, Portugal, France, Holland,
and England—strong enough in armed might and rich
enough in treasure to engage in larger enterprise, fortune
opened for them, first, the Atlantic and then the world
arena in which to deploy their unresting energies. As the
grateful merchants of London long afterward carved on
the tomb of William Pitt, that brilliant forerunner of mod-
ern imperialism, commerce was again united with war and
made to flourish.

It was the age-old lure of substantial things that sent
the path-breakers of the seas on their perilous journeys—
Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492 and da Gama around
the Cape to India six years later. ‘Their adventures were
only novel incidents in the continuous search for riches.
Centuries before, the Romans had carried on an immense
commerce with the gorgeous East; in Oriental markets they
gathered spices, silks, perfumes, and jewels for the fash-
ionable shops of the Eternal City, and from their treasure
chests poured a golden stream of specie to pay for these
luxuries. In vain did the stern Roman moralists—Puritans
of that time—cry out against the thoughtless maidens and
proud dames who emptied their purses buying gauds and
trinkets brought at such cost from the ends of the earth.
When the Romans passed, their Teutonic heirs gazed upon
the spoils of the East with the same fascination that had
gripped the grand ladies of the Via Sacra. All through
the middle ages a traffic in the luxuries of the Orient con-
tinued with increasing volume, enriching the Mohammedan
and Italian merchants who served as brokers for the
bazaars of the Indies and the shops of Madrid, Lisbon,
Paris, Bruges, and London. If the risks of the overland
journeys were great, the gains of the dangerous business
were enormous.

Inevitably, therefore, an ardent desire to enlarge their
profits by direct operations seized the traders of Europe,
driving first the Italians, then the Spanish, Portuguese,

8 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Dutch, English, and French, out upon the wide Atlantic in
a search for unbroken water routes to the Far East. It is
true that Queen Isabella, on yielding to the importunities of
Columbus, stipulated in the bond the conversion of heathens
to the true Catholic faith; it is true that Catholic mission-
aries were pioneers in the economic penetration of unknown
lands; but in the main the men who organized and com-
manded expedition after expedition into Asia, the Amer-
icas, and Africa had their hearts set on the profits of trade
and the spoils of empire. In fact, Spain followed closely
the example of Rome, mother of her civilization, when
she sent forth military chieftains to conquer, enslave, rule,
and exploit.

Nor were the English less eager to gather riches by this
process. Sir Francis Drake, who looted his way around the
world during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, swept treasure
into his chests with a reckless disregard for the rights
of private property that would have delighted the Gothic
barbarians who plundered their way through the streets
of Rome. Captain John Smith was ordered by his superiors
to hunt for gold in Virginia and for a passage to the South
Seas, where it was thought more booty awaited new vikings.
His men too would have enslaved the Indians and ruled
a subject population if the fierce, proud spirit of the natives
had not baffled their designs. ‘They tried and failed. Even
the voyage of the Pilgrims, who fled to America for their
conscience’ sake had to be financed; and the capitalists
who advanced funds for this hazardous venture expected
to reap rewards for their aid.

Nevertheless, the story of human migration cannot all
be told in terms of commerce, profits, conquest, and exploi-
tation. A search for trade has not been the sole motive
that has led wanderers into distant places, an empire of
toiling subjects not the only vision before migratory bands.
Unquestionably many of the Greek colonies which adorned
the Mediterranean fringe rose on the sites of mere trad-
ing posts or were planted to make room for redundant

ENGLAND’S COLONIAL SECRET 9

populations at home, but others sprang from domestic
unrest and from the ambitions of leaders. Moreover, the
Greeks went far beyond mere ruling and exploiting; they
often peopled colonies with their own racial stocks, repro-
ducing the culture of their homeland, and sometimes even
improving on their inheritance. It was in outlying prov-
inces that two of the greatest Greek philosophers, Thales
and Pythagoras, set up their schools and it is on the ruins
of tiny cities in lands remote from Athens that some of the
noblest monuments of Greek taste are found to-day—mute
testimony to a faithful reproduction of Hellenic culture.

Not even the German migrations into the Roman empire
were purely economic in origin. ‘They have been attrib-
uted by some writers merely to overpopulation; but the
records that have come down to us do not bear out that
simple thesis. ‘Che causes were varied, including the pres-
sure of invaders driving Germans from their own lands,
internecine quarrels ending in the flight of the vanquished
over the borders into Rome, countless tribal wars spring-
ing from lust and ambition, and finally the lure of Roman
luxury and peace. It was only in the final stages of the
German invasions into Rome that direction of the proc-
ess was taken by the organized war band rather than by
the moving clan with flocks, herds, and household goods—
the war band that conquered and settled down upon subject
populations. Though the Spanish migrations which later
carried Iberic civilization out into a new Latin empire even-
tually encircling the globe were an extension of the preda-
tory operation, the heroic deeds of Catholic missionaries,
daring for religion’s sake torture and death, bore witness
to a new force in the making of world dominion.

Into the English migration to America also entered other
factors besides trade and conquest. Undoubtedly the po-
litical motive, though perhaps even it had economic roots,
. was a potent element in the colonization of the Atlantic
seaboard, transferring the dynastic and national rivalries

of the Old World to the New. Grudges and ambitions

10 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

that might have flamed up and burnt out on European
battlefields now spread round the earth and precipitated
contests for dominion in the four quarters of the globe.
The settlement of Virginia under the English flag was,
among other things, an act of defiance, directed against
the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal to whom Pope Alex-
ander VI had assigned the American continents.

In no relation can the religious motive in English expan-
sion be neglected without doing violence to the record, even
though dynastic and economic elements were mingled with
the operations of Protestant missionaries as they sought
to bring Indians into their own fold and to check the ex-
tension of papal authority. The first duty of Virginians,
declared Captain Smith, was to “preach, baptise into the
Christian religion, and by the propagation of the Gospel
to recover out of the arms of the devil, a number of poor
and miserable souls wrapt up unto death in almost invincible
ignorance.” Still more significant in English expansion
than the work of preachers in quest of souls to save were
the labors of laymen from the religious sects of every
variety who fled to the wilderness in search of a haven all
their own.

Thus it must be said that as faith in Mahomet inspired
the armies that carried forward the scimitar under the
crescent, threatening to subdue three continents, so faith in
' Christ inspired the missionaries who served with the fore-
runners of expanding Europe and mingled with the hopes
and passions of the colonists who subdued the waste places
of the New World to the economy and culture of the Old.
And to this religious motive must be added the love of
adventure, curiosity about the unknown, forced sale into
slavery, the spirit of liberty beckoning from the frontiers
of civilization, the whip of the law, and the fierce, innate
restlessness which seizes uncommon people in rebellion
against the monotonous routine of ordered life.

§

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 11

Among the movements that have scattered the human
race far and wide over the surface of the earth, the
English migration to America was in one fundamental re-
spect unique. Spain, like Rome, conquered and exploited,
but the English, by force of circumstances, were driven
into another line of expansion. They had no less lust for
gold than had the Spanish, but the geographical area which
fell into their hands at first did not yield the precious
treasure. They would have rejoiced to find, overcome, and
exploit an ancient American civilization—another Mexico
or Peru; their work in India revealed the willingness of the
spirit and flesh; and yet in the economy of history this
was not to be their fate in the New World.

Instead of natives submissive to servitude, instead of
old civilizations ‘ripe for conquest, the English found an
immense continent of virgin soil and forest, sparsely settled
by primitive peoples who chose death rather than bondage.
To this continent the English colonial leaders, like the
Greeks in expansion, transported their own people, their
own economy, and the culture of the classes from which
they sprang, reproducing in a large measure the civiliza-
tion of the mother country. Unlike the Spaniards and
other empire builders, the English succeeded in founding
a new state, which became vast in extent, independent in
government, and-basically European in stock. ‘That achieve-
ment is one of the capital facts of world history.

How did it happen that the English, who came late upon
the imperial scene, alone among the European powers
achieved just this result? It was certainly not because they
were first in the arts of exploration, war, and colonization.
Far from it; the Italians were the pathfinders of the high
sea. Three hundred years before the English ventured from
their little island home to plant colonies in Virginia, Italian
mariners had sailed out through the Straits of Gibraltar,
and down the coast of Africa in search of a water route
to the fabled markets of the East. It was an Italian,
Christopher Columbus, who unfurled the flag of Spain

12 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

above a motley crew of many nationalities and made the
fateful voyage of 1492 that discovered America. It was a
Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, who rounded the Cape of
Good Hope with the banner of Portugal flying at his mast-
head, visited the markets of India, and brought back treas-
ure and tales that filled all Europe with commotions.

Before a single English sea captain dared the wide At-
lantic, the impetuous Spaniard held in fee the West Indies,
ruled huge empires on two American continents, and laid
claims to fair domains in the Orient. More than half a
century before Francis Drake bore Queen Elizabeth’s pen-
nant round the world, the expedition of the indomitable
Portuguese, Magellan, under Spanish patronage, on the
most perilous voyage in the annals of the sea, had circum-
navigated the globe. When Henry VII, stirring from his
insular lethargy for a brief moment, bethought himself in
1497 of high adventure beyond the Atlantic, it was an
Italian, John Cabot, who took charge of the king’s ships,
directed the voyage that skirted the shores of Labrador,
and gave England her lawyer’s claim to the North American
continent.

Three years previous to the planting of the first successful
English post in America at Jamestown, the French had
established a permanent colony at Port Royal on the banks
of the Annapolis. Long before a single English ship
had plowed the waters of the Indian Ocean or threaded
its way among the spice islands of the golden East, the
resolute Dutch had visited a hundred Indian ports, estab-
lished trading factories, and planted the outposts of empire.
Slowly indeed did the idea dawn in the minds of Englishmen
that, while other nations might carry goods, religion, cul-
ture, and the sword across the ocean, they themselves could
found great states, occupied and governed mainly by people
of their own stock.

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 13

The success of the English in this form of colonial enter-
prise was due to many factors of circumstance and policy.
Their insular position freed them from the expense of main-
taining a large army and required them to put their money
into a navy for protection. The ships which protected them,
unlike armies, could sail the seven seas, seize distant terri-
tories, and defend broad dominions. Early in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, English statesmen saw with half an eye
the sign of the sea power. They did not evolve a grand
scheme such as Captain Alfred Mahan, long after the deeds,
formulated in a coherent and cogent theory of words, but
they discovered that lands beyond the seas could be per-
manently held only by a sovereign who also ruled the waves.

Acting on that understanding they laid the foundations
of the navy which struck down the Spaniards in the battle
of the Armada in 1588, the Dutch in a long series of con-
flicts, the French in two hundred years of warfare, and at
last, in the fullness of time, the Germans who grasped for
the trident. It was through the sea power that England
was able to seize and hold the geographical theaters for her
commercial and colonial empire.

Rivalries and jealousies of the continental states likewise
served England’s imperial fortune. Slowly, through their
endless strife with rulers on the other side of the Channel,
English statesmen worked out a flexible system known as
‘the balance of power,” which made for safety at home and
dominion in America, Asia, and Africa. With a skill that
was a marvel to the seasoned chancelleries of Europe, they
played the Dutch against the French, the French against
the Dutch, the Prussians against the French, and the French
against the Prussians.

By such means the governments of Europe that singly or
in combination might have defied England on the sea were
worn down to wrathful impotence. Dutch soldiers allied
with England sent to their graves thousands of Louis XIV’s
best men who, if they had lived, might have built securely
the groundwork of a French state in Canada. The power

14 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of France that might have grasped India was broken by the
shock of Frederick the Great’s picked Prussian troops on
the battlefields of Europe.

The political condition of the Continent, as well as its
undying rivalries, was another factor that favored English
colonial success. In the seventeenth century, all eastern
Europe was landlocked and slumbering in ancient customs
or engaged in local conflicts that had little or no bearing on
trade and empire. Central Europe—the geographical re-
gion now occupied by Germany, Austria, Italy, and a number
of minor states—was in chaos. Germany was an aggrega-
tion of petty feudal domains from which Prussia was just
emerging under Hohenzollern mastery. Italy was not a
nation, merely a ‘“‘geographical expression’’—a collection of
warring principalities and jealous cities.

For various reasons, moreover, the Atlantic powers that
might have frustrated English colonial designs were not
prepared to supply people of their own stock to possess
the soil of the New World. Though the Dutch were full
of zeal and enterprise in both hemispheres, they were pri-
marily traders, and the Hudson Valley, which was to be
their New Netherland, was wrested from them by the
English sea power. France had a population many times
that of England, her people were ardent explorers, skill-
ful traders in distant markets, and shrewd managers in
commerce; but French monarchs wasted their substance in
interminable wars on the Continent which promised the
addition of new principalities or the aggrandizement of
their families. ‘The people, the money, the labor that
might have made New France a living reality instead of
a mere dream, were destroyed in futile fighting which
yielded neither glory nor profit. Moreover, when in 1685
the French king outlawed all his Protestant subjects, he
even denied them a haven in his American dominions.

Spain, whose warriors carried her flag around the world
and whose missionaries counted no barrier insurmountable,
was also a feudal and clerical power rather than a com-

ENGLAND’S COLONIAL SECRET 15

mercial and manufacturing country; her peasants bound to
the land in serfdom could not migrate at will to subdue with
plow and hoe the soil won by the sword. Indeed while the
English colonies in America were but mewing their in-
fancy, the Spanish empire, majestic in outward appearance,
was already racked by administrative incompetence and
financial decay. Finally, Spain’s resolute neighbor, Portu-
gal, great enough to seize Brazil, was too small to over-
come on the sea the might of Britain. So auspicious cir-
cumstances on the Continent lent favor to the English
cause. )
§

Something more than strength at sea, ingenuity in manip-
ulating the balance of power, and weakness among neigh-
bors was, however, necessary to the planting of success-
ful colonies across the Atlantic. Essentially that under-
taking was civilian in character. It called for capital to
equip expeditions and finance the extension of settlements.
It demanded leadership in administration and the spirit of
business enterprise. Relying largely upon agriculture for
support, at least in the initial stages, colonization also re-
quired managers capable of directing that branch of
economy. In all its ramifications, it depended upon the
labor of strong persons able and eager to work in field,
home, and shop at the humbler tasks which give strength
and prosperity to society—clearing ground, spinning wool,
plowing, sowing, reaping, garnering, and carrying on the
other processes that sustain life.

Nor was that all. If the European stock was to pre-
serve its racial strains and not fuse with Indians and Ne-
groes, as was the case in large parts of Spanish-America,
colonization could not possibly succeed without capable and
energetic women of every class who could endure the hard-
ships of pioneer life. Finally, being a branch of business
enterprise, it could not flourish without a fortunate com-
bination of authority and self-government: the one, guaran-

16 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

teeing order and cooperation; the other, individual initia-
tive necessary to cope with strange and protean cir-
cumstance.

At the opening of the seventeenth century it was Eng-
land, of all the powers of Europe, that was best fitted for
this great human task. The English people were at that
time far ahead of their Continental neighbors on the road
from feudal to bourgeois economy, a long and dusty road
marked by toil, revolution, and war. In concrete terms,
just what did this mean? First of all, it meant the over-
throw, or, at least, the social subjugation of the feudal and
military class—a class nourished by landed estates and
committed to the ideal that fighting was the noblest work
of man.

With the decline of the feudal order went the down-
fall of the monopolistic clergy similarly sustained by landed
property. Correlative with this social change was the
emancipation of the smaller landed gentry, the yeomanry,
and the peasants from the rigid grasp of their overlords
—a process of individualization which affected women as
well as men, giving to agriculture new forms of owner-
ship and management. Finally through the dissolution of
the old order there rose to power in England a class of
merchants, traders, and capitalists, dwellers in towns, or
‘“‘bourgs,” from which, for the want of a more comprehen-
sive and accurate term, the word bourgeois has been de-
rived to characterize modern civilization.

With the decay of feudal and clerical authority went
political and legal changes of vital significance. For the
successful direction of business enterprise, the wayward and
irresponsible conduct of absolute monarchs, accustomed to
tax, imprison, and harass their subjects at will, was utterly
impossible. Regularity in economy called for regularity
in government—the standardization of the monarchy by
rules of accountancy; hence the development of constitu-
tional law—of political self-government for the classes cap-
able of grasping and retaining it. Being secular in nature,

ENGLAND’S COLONIAL SECRET Ly

business enterprise was more concerned with the character
and credit of those with whom it carried on transactions
than with their theological opinions; hence a decline in reli-
gious intolerance and the rise of the spirit of practical
accomniodation.

Historians have long been at swords’ points in trying
to explain England’s early transition from a feudal and
clerical civilization to a civilian and bourgeois culture. The
Nordic school of scholars delights in ascribing this devel-
opment to the peculiar genius of Teutonic peoples for free-
dom and self-government. Its most eloquent advocate,
John Richard Green, who united racial pride with evan-
gelical enthusiasm, saw in local meetings of rude tribes-
men held in the forests of northern Germany—a moot
more ignorant than an assembly of Russian mujiks—the
origin of the English Parliament, the source of popular
liberty. He looked upon it, he exclaimed, as upon the head-
waters of a mighty river.

Though once widely accepted, the interpretation of the
Teutonic school has been sharply challenged in recent times,
French scholars, not to our surprise, advancing to throw
down the gage. Leaders among these doubters seek to
demonstrate with great learning that the bulk of the Eng-
lish people are not Teutonic at all, but Celtic—conquered
first by the Romans, then by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally
by the Normans. English institutions, they tell us, are not
Germanic, but a peculiar mixture of primitive Celtic, an-
cient Roman, barbaric Nordic, and Gallo-Norman cultures.
If the Teutons had a genius for developing parliamentary
government, trial by jury, liberty of speech and press, a free
peasantry, and a triumphant bourgeoisie, why, such critics
ask, was Germany, the original home of the Teutons, one
of the last nations of western Europe to exhibit these ele-
ments of civilization? ‘The question is unanswered and
the battle royal over the true key to English social devel-
opment goes on.

The sober judgment of those given to research rather

18 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

than controversy runs against any single explanation of the
peculiarities in the institutions of England in the seventeenth
century. Modern scholars are inclined to lay stress upon
factors more tangible than innate characteristics of the
people, namely, the early establishment of a despotic mon-
archy and the insularity afforded by the English Channel.
The stark William the Conqueror and his powerful suc-
cessors were able in the main to hold in subjection the feu-
dal lords, lay and clerical, and in time weld warring king-
doms, principalities, and dukedoms into a fairly homo-
geneous society with one law, one administration, and a
single language. Happily for the growing nation, the at-
tempts of the baronage to break the Crown by imposing
upon it the anarchic restraints of Magna Carta in the inter-
ests of inherited feudal privileges were defeated by the
magnificent disregard which King John’s successors showed
for most of the prohibitions written down in that historic
document.

Intimately related to this civilizing process was the Eng-
lish Channel—‘‘The Silver Streak’’-—which, by cutting
England off from her warlike and ambitious neighbors on
the Continent, protected her government and her people
against invading armies. Not after 1066 did a foreign
marauder set foot on English soil; not after the close of the
Wars of the Roses in 1485 was there a desperate quarrel
of feudal lords to paralyze the fruitful occupations of in- |
dustry in town and country. The king needed no powerful
army and military caste to defend his fields and cities;
these agencies atrophied, and as they decayed, the monarch
who commanded them and the church that blessed them
shared in their decline. To borrow Ruskin’s images, the
mighty were pulled down from their frowning crags; the
bourgeois could sit safely on their money bags; and la-
borers, in their tattered rags, could search for employment,
far away.

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 19

When the feudal nobility was definitely broken as a rul-
ing class, the councils of the king and the ranks of the aris-
tocracy were steadily recruited from the lower orders.
All English: society moved in the direction of shops and
warehouses. Henry VIII’s ruthless secular adviser,
Thomas Cromwell, was the son of a blacksmith; Cardinal
Wolsey, who lamented that he had served his King more
faithfully than his God, was the son of a tradesman. After
the doughty Henry had quarreled with the Pope over Anne
Boleyn, he confiscated the lands of the monasteries, and
distributed a large part of it among favorites of lower
origins, thus sinking the ancient baronage deeper in a wel-
ter of newcomers.

Hard beset for money during his disputes with an obsti-
nate Commons, James I further diluted the military caste
by selling honors and titles over the counter at a fixed
price to merchants and minor gentry who could command
the lucre. By the end of the seventeenth century, there-
fore, only a handful of noble families could trace their
lineage back to proud lords and knights who gathered
around the standards of Norman kings. The civil war
which raged from 1642 to 1649, with its deaths on the
field of battle and sequestrations of estates, almost com-
pleted the ruin of the baronage. Henceforward, at least,
no iron gates shut the aspiring bourgeois from the fair
realm of the titled aristocracy or the councils of state.

This flow of forces which brought disaster to barons of
war and lords of church and gave titles to rich merchants
was accompanied by prosperity and activity in commerce.
The insistent note that runs through the writings of conti-
nental travelers who visited England in the sixteenth cen-
tury is that of surprise at the wealth, comfort, and wel-
fare of the middle classes and artisans of English towns.
‘The riches of England are greater than those of any
other country in Europe!” exclaimed the author of the
Italian Relations who knew the land ruled by Elizabeth.
Explaining this wonder, he added that the wealth in Lon-

20 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

don “is not due to the inhabitants being noblemen and
gentlemen; on the contrary, they are persons of low de-
gree and artificers who have congregated there from all
parts of the Island, from Flanders, and from every other
place. . . . Still the citizens of London are esteemed quite
as highly there as the Venetian gentlemen are in Venice.”
Artisans became merchants; merchants bought country es-
tates; new landed gentlemen took on the style of old
families.

To speak summarily, a passion for bourgeois comfort
spread everywhere. The whole domestic life of the mer-
cantile classes was altered: stories were added to their
houses; the number of rooms was increased; the use of the
entrance hall as a sleeping place was abandoned; servants
were more sharply separated from the family; beds took
the place of pallets; plate and furniture accumulated; con-
tentment with primitive simplicity in living gave way to
the quest for material goods.

Now the comfort so prized by the rising middle class
was bought with money and, after the looting of feudal
wars was stopped, money was most easily acquired by com-
merce, especially beyond the seas. It was not uncommon
for promoters of trading expeditions to gather in profits
running from one hundred to four hundred per cent; in-
deed some of the early voyages to India netted twelve hun-
dred per cent. In a single year, 1622, a consignment of
goods bought in India for £386,000 sold in England for
£1,915,000. The gains of peaceful trade were augmented
from the spoils gathered by sea dogs, such as Drake and
Hawkins, who raided the Spanish towns in America, over-
hauled galleons laden with gold and silver from Mexico and
Peru, and seized Spanish merchant vessels from the East
Indies bearing a king’s ransom in spices and precious stuffs.
From the New World gold and silver poured into Europe
in an ever increasing stream, rising, according to Hum-
boldt’s estimates, from £52,000 annually at the opening of
the sixteenth century to £280,000 annually at its close; and

| . vered in their full share. A
frenzy for tra fhig classes in England; the love

of money spirit ‘‘permeated all depart-
ments of li d almost every sentiment.’

No wonde bossession of land gave dignity and
power to the Ie tocracy, so the possession of houses,
factorie s ave strength and independence to the
new middle clzss, For the men it opened the way to a posi-

security, an easier life, an enlarged oppor-
re property and enter trade themselves. At
of the seventeenth century, the very air was
schemes for growing rich in a thousand ven-
bnnected with the commerce and settlements of ex-
g England.
ing close together in the towns, the mercantile classes
acquired the habit of codperation whenever capital
ond the reach of a single individual was required. ‘Tak-
their cue perhaps from old merchant guilds, they
arned how to unite their accumulations and their inge-
ity in great corporations or companies chartered by the
rown to trade and plant colonies. In the reign of Eliza-
beth they formed the English Levant Company, which
seized a share of the commerce with the East that had been
monopolized by the Italians; when, in 1587, the last of the
Venetian argosies, as if to celebrate the awful ruin of the
Adriatic Queen, foundered in a storm off the Needles on its
way to the London market, English capitalists were ready
to carry forward the business on their own account. An-
other corporation, the Muscovy Company, pushed its traf-
fic into Russia, reaching through the river systems of that
country far southward into Persia. A third concern, the
East India Company, created in 1600, sent its agents over
the route opened by Vasco da Gama a hundred years be-
fore and founded, on the banks of the Ganges, the trading
posts that expanded into the British dominion.

22 THE RISE OF CIZILIZATION

rmanent settlements
read throughout
@sand the practice
en well estab-
ace from the
ions. ‘The
tnish both
7» sincorpo-
ishops,

So when the time came
in America, the lure of
English society, capital had b
of forming corporations for f
lished. It was not necessary to
royal treasury to launch epoch-mal
middle classes were themselves pre
leadership and money. In the Londe
rated to develop Virginia, were, bes
knights, and gentlemen, plain comm hant
tailors, stationers, shoemakers, haberd? By 3) ars,
ironmongers, cutlers, leather sellers, saddlers, eowainers,
weavers, carpenters, representatives of all the Offa
tant trades, and two women—Katherine West ar
cent Ramsdent, a widow. The great Company that }
the first successful colony represented in fact the do
elements in English commercial life. Its stock was a!
tised in the pulpit as well as in the market places and
scriptions were made in the interests of religion, patr
ism, and profit.

§

For the agricultural work of colonization, England ha
two landed classes from which capable leaders could bé
drawn—country gentlemen and yeomen. The first of
these groups consisted of substantial landed proprietors
who lived in comfortable manor houses on broad acres,
served as local justices of the peace by royal appointment,
sat in the House of Commons by election of their neigh-
bors, and thus combined the management of their estates
with the functions of a governing class. From this order
came the Cromwells, Hampdens, and Pyms, who challenged
the rule of the Stuarts and brought Charles I to the scaffold
in old England; and the Winthrops, Endicotts, and Eatons,
who made the beginnings of a self-governing common-
wealth, Massachusetts, in New England.

In the second of these important groups, the yeomanry,

a ee

al
ENGLAND’S COLONIAL SECRET 23

were free and proud owners of small farms, noted for
their industry and independence of spirit. They had
energy, initiative, character, and property. They knew
how to till the soil, rotate and care for crops, manage
laborers, and conserve their interests. They, more than
the gentry, furnished economic managers to direct the de-
velopment of colonies in America.

To planting corporations, the very process that trans-
formed England from a feudal into a mercantile state also
furnished a mass of laborers detached from the soil and
prepared to face the primitive conditions of life and work
on the American frontier. It is a fact of deep significance
in the history of migration that serfdom practically dis-
appeared in England more than two hundred years before
its last legal traces were removed from the Continent. The
essential economic characteristic of serfdom was bondage
to the soil. A serf was not a chattel; he was not bought
and sold in the market place; he was attached to the land,
going with the estate whenever it was transferred. As
land without his labor was worthless, it was the interest of
the lord to hold him fast to it, thus making him virtually
a part of real property and depriving him of all initiative
for migration.

Against serfdom the drift of economic life in England be-
gan to run heavily by the middle of the fifteenth cen-
tury, but the institution was not abolished by one drastic
action, such as Alexander made in Russia in 1861 or Lin-
coln started in the United States two years later. On the
contrary it was by gradual stages extending over two cen-
turies that English serfs commuted their fixed service of
labor and produce into the form of a cash payment; it
was by becoming renters that they finally broke the tie
which bound them to the soil and won their liberty. But
that liberty had its disadvantages; for, if the renter could
voluntarily leave the soil which nourished him, he could
also be driven from it when his lord found more lucrative
uses for the land.

24 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

As things turned out, the whole rural economy of Eng-
land was altered with the disappearance of serfdom.
Greedy lords now seized the common lands of villages un-
der acts of Parliament, made by their agents, authorizing
them to enclose great areas and extinguish the ancient rights
of the peasants. When, in the sixteenth century, the
woolen industry rose to high prosperity and sheep-raising
became more profitable than cropping, thousands of land-
lords drove off their tenants and turned their fields into
pastures, changing prosperous hamlets into deserted vil-
lages. At the same time the vast estates of the monaster-
ies, also tilled by peasants, passed into the hands of
secular masters bent on profits and the walls of grand
old abbeys sank down to ruin to receive their ivy crown.
By various procedures, therefore, strong and active peas-
ants, enamored of the soil that nurtured them, were trans-
formed into wageworkers or sturdy beggars; the public
poor relief that superseded monastic alms was heavily bur-
dened; city streets were filled with paupers; and political
economists were led to cry out: ‘‘What shall we do with the
surplus population ?”’

Of all European countries, England alone had an abun-
dance of men and women accustomed to hard labor in the
fields and yet cut loose from bondage to the soil. It was
a dubious freedom which they enjoyed—so dubious that
it prepared them for migration to the New World in spite
of all the hazards.

§

Absolutely imperative to the successful development of
European civilization in America was the participation of
women in every sphere of life and labor. Soldiers could
conquer and rule native populations, but colonies could not
be founded and maintained without women. And England
of the seventeenth century had women of talent and experi-
ence, skilled in industrial arts, accustomed to the manage-
ment of property and employees. On every hand English

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 25

women took a lively interest in industrial, political, and reli-
gious activities. Of this fact indisputable evidence appears
in the records of the period—old books on agriculture and
the handicrafts, orders and papers of the justices of the
peace who tried offenders against the law and who fixed the
wages of laborers, documents and entries of craft guilds,
archives of the great departments of government, and pri-
vate memoirs of the day.

Even the women of the landed families were not idly
rich. Rather were they responsible managers of large
households in which numerous industries, now established
in factories, were conducted under their watchful eyes. Nor
were their energies confined to domestic pursuits. A grand-
daughter of Oliver Cromwell was director of a salt works.
It is said of her that ‘‘she would sometimes, after a day
of drudgery, go to the assembly at Yarmouth and appear
one of the most brilliant there.’ Muriel Lyttelton, wife
of a condemned Papist, begged her husband’s forfeited
estate from King James and “with the utmost prudence
and economy’”’ retrieved the fortune, educated the children,
and discharged the duties of the head of the family. The
memoirs of Mrs. Hutchinson, wife of the famous Puritan
Colonel, show her maintaining a keen interest in the politi-
cal controversies of her age and once at least in the lobby
of the House of Commons during the absence of her hus-
band, working against the passage of an objectionable
measure. Women of her class often acted as executors of
estates; they mingled in the throngs at court petitioning
for grants of wardships, monopolies, patents, and other
royal favors.

In an age when fortunes were relatively small, women
of the trading class had not yet joined the leisure order de-
voted to gaiety and trifles. On the contrary, they were
often partners in their husbands’ enterprises or, as widows
and daughters of merchants, were in business on their own
account. In the records of the time they appear with strik-
ing frequency as pawnbrokers, money-lenders, stationers,

26 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

booksellers, shopkeepers of many sorts, shipowners, and
clothing contractors for the army and navy. For example,
we find Susanna Angell, a widow, and her daughter peti-
tioning the king in 1636 for the right to land a cargo of
gunpowder and sell it in the kingdom or transport it to
Holland. Court records tell of Ellenor Woodward, an
ironmonger, up on a charge of selling short weight. Joan
Dant, a Quakeress, widow of a poor weaver, embarked in
trade as a pedlar and amassed a fortune of £9,000 in mer-
chandizing, which she devoted to charity. “I got it by the
rich,” she quaintly said, ‘“‘and I mean to leave it to the
poor.”

In industry, no less than in trade, women were active,
often combining production with selling. They were
bakers and sometimes members of the bakers’ companies;
the court records of old Manchester tell us of one Martha
Wrigley in durance vile for giving her customers short
weights. Occasionally they were butchers; of the twenty-
three meat dealers in Chester, three were women. ‘They
managed flour mills and sold flour. ‘They were in earlier
days brewers and innkeepers—brewster being only the
feminine of brewer—but when the state made the trade a
monopoly their enterprise was confined to the domestic vat.
In many of the staple crafts the labor of women was a
factor of importance, especially after the guild system com-
menced to disintegrate. For instance, toward the close
of the seventeenth century, when woolen goods formed in
value one-third the total export trade of England, there
were eight women to every man in the woolen industry,
according to one estimate, and on the most conservative
reckoning at least three to one.

To a large extent the silk industry, once, almost, if not
entirely a feminine monopoly, was still in the hands of
women—though it had sunk to the status of a sweated
trade in the reign of James I. While men tried their best
to control the lucrative broadcloth manufacture for their
own benefit, women, especially widows, engaged in it in

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 27

defiance of local ordinances. In those days the term
spinster was not reserved for maidens of uncertain age, but
was merely the feminine of spinner—just as webster was
the feminine of webber. In fact the textile trade became so
attractive to women that they crowded into it from the
fields and kitchens, leading Defoe to complain at the opening
of the eighteenth century that ‘‘wenches wont go to service
at I2 pence a week when they can get 7 shillings or 8
shillings a week at spinning,” revealing in his lament the
existence even then of a servant problem for the English
middle classes.

Especially important for colonization were the skill and
strength of women in agriculture. Old treatises on farming
and schedules of wages fixed by justices of the peace tell
impressive stories of their toiling in the fields, raking hay,
driving wagons, stowing hay away in mows, guarding flocks
in pastures, receiving meager wages—less than the men in
those distant days before the demand for equal pay for
equal work. For shearing sheep and pulling peas, women
earned sixpence a day, against eight for their male com-
petitors. Special wages were paid to women servants ‘‘that
taketh charge of brewing, baking, ketching, milk house, or
malting.”” Those that helped to thatch roofs were not so
favored: “She that draweth thatch hath 3d. a day; and she
that serveth the thatcher 4d. a day because she also is to
temper the morter and carry it to the top of the house’ —
runs the entry in one of the books on rural economy.
With good reason could a traveler in old England write
that ‘‘the men and the women themselves toiled like their
horses.’ When, therefore, the various companies and
proprietors engaged in colonizing America offered to mar-
ried men double the quantity of land tendered to single men
and made grants to maids as well as bachelors, they knew
how valuable were the labors of English women in every
branch of husbandry. No doubt the migration of families
was determined by domestic council, for the most part,
and after the momentous step was taken, the women

Z8 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

assumed their share of the hardships and their full burden
of responsibilities.
§

The dissolution of the feudal order which was marked
by the rise of the middle and laboring classes produced
collaterally profound religious and political changes that
stimulated colonial expansion. As the rigidity of medieval
economic life was associated with dogmatism and authority
in religion and politics, so the break-up of that order was
attended by controversy in theology and revolution in
government.

On one side the Protestant revolt against the Catholic
system was strongly economic in character—a struggle of
princes and middle classes to free themselves from the
tithes, fees, laws, and jurisdiction of the clergy and at the
same time to get possession of the immense estates of the
church. Henry VIII’s quarrel with the Pope and separa-
tion from Rome merely accelerated the inevitable. As far
as Henry was concerned, the uprising was to be attended
by no vital modifications in religious dogma. During his
reign, the church in England was simply made subservient
to the Crown; bishops and archbishops became royal ap-
pointees and a large part of the confiscated ecclesiastical
property was turned over to the king and his favorites—
the remainder being dedicated to religious uses under state
control.

But having once breached the dike, Henry could not stop
the flood of “perverse opinion’; and violent oscillations
soon occurred in religious affairs. Under his son, Edward
VI, Protestant dogma, tinged with leveling evangelicalism,
was made the law of the land; under Mary the country was
swung back to Catholicism; under Elizabeth a well-ordered
Protestant Church with creed and prayer book was estab-
lished by act of Parliament.

Each of these changes in the legal religion of the land
helped to unsettle the opinions of the people in spite of

ENGLAND’S COLONIAL SECRET 29

all official efforts to force conformity upon them. The
printing press, the revival of pagan literature, the multi-
plication of books on travel, commerce, and economy, the
translation of the Bible into English so that the multitude
could read it and dispute over matters of interpretation, and
the corroding insinuations of business and natural science
produced a luxuriant variety of religious sectarianism.

On the right were partisans of the Established Church
who clung to the lawful order and, more extreme than they,
the Catholics who hoped for a return to the vanished past;
on the left were Independents, or Separatists, who proposed
to abandon the Establishment or to abolish it altogether.
In the center were Puritans who merely wished to “purify”
the Anglican system by minor changes in creed and cere-
mony. Scattered along the line at different points stood
Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and other sects, each pro-
claiming its own gospel and its particular path to heaven.

Bewildered at first by the welter of dogmas, the king, the
Anglican clergy, and their adherents tried to stem the rush-
ing tides, bringing various engines of oppression to bear
upon the dissident elements. In pursuing this policy, they
unwittingly aided the work of colonization. It was then
that the members of the congregation at Scrooby who after-
ward found their way to Plymouth ‘‘were hunted and perse-
cuted on every side. . . . Some were taken and clapped
up in prison; others had their houses beset and watched
night and day . . . and the most were fain to fly and leave
their houses and habitations.”

In the end the advocates of uniformity and suppression
failed. Out of the clash of sects, the ferment of opinion,
the growth of doubt, and the direction of intellectual ener-
gies to practical considerations, finally came a degree of
religious toleration which counted more heavily in successful
colonization than religious oppression. If the English kings
and their advisers hated the heretics, they did not follow
the example of the Bourbon monarchs in France by exclud-
ing them from the territories lying far away.

30 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Instead of banishing merchants and artisans to enrich
other countries, English statesmen opened the gates of their
American colonies to every kind of religious faith that the
stirring life of the Old World could furnish—to Catholics,
Separatists, Puritans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists
from the British Isles; to Lutherans, Dunkards, Moravians,
Mennonites, Huguenots, and Salzburgers from the Conti-
nent. ‘They looked with favor upon the German Lutherans
who crowded into Pennsylvania, subdued the wilderness,
and produced wheat, corn, bacon, and lumber to exchange
for English manufactures. They even winked at news of
Jews settling here and there in the colonies, especially after
Oliver Cromwell’s example in toleration at home. When
the plantations were once started and their significance to
trade and empire disclosed, it was impossible to bring them
into any scheme of religious uniformity. On the contrary
clerical authority waned with the growth of business
enterprise.

§

In the operations that unhorsed the feudal lords and
disintegrated the power of the clergy, the merchants and
landed gentry of England attained a high degree of self-
government and civil liberty. Unlike France and Spain,
England had never discarded the institution of representa-
tive government which had sprung up in the middle ages.
Serving as voters and members of the House of Commons
and as justices of the peace in the counties, towns, and
parishes, the gentry and merchants had long taken part in
the administration of public affairs. And in the seventeenth
century they definitely attained supremacy in the state by
the establishment of parliamentary sovereignty. As in
France long afterward, this revolution was accompanied
by violence, the execution of the king, social disorder, the
seizure of property, extreme measures, dictatorship, reac-
tion, and the ultimate triumph of the essential ideas ad-
vanced by the leaders in the uprising.

ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET 31

In the age of Elizabeth there were mutterings of discon-
tent; in the reign of her successor, James I, the House of
Commons, speaking for the smaller landed gentry and the
merchants, set forth the rights of its constituents in lan-
guage which even a Stuart could understand; Charles I,
learning nothing and forgetting nothing, tried a decade of
personal government which ended in civil war and his death
_upon the scaffold in 1649. ‘Then followed experiments in
democracy two hundred years ahead of the times, which
merely culminated in the Cromwellian dictatorship and,
after the death of the stern Oliver, in the restoration of the
monarchy. Reaction came as night succeeds the day, but the
swelling currents of English commerce steadily recruited
the ranks of the middle classes. Accordingly, when James II
tried to turn back the tide in 1688, he was overthrown and
the supremacy of Parliament was fixed for all time—a
House of Lords crowded with newcomers and a House of
Commons, both dominated in colonial and foreign affairs
by mercantile considerations.

History has attached to this revolution the title ‘‘Puri-
tan” as if it were essentially religious in character, but the
title is primarily due to the “‘intellectual climate” of the age.
The thought of the times was still deeply tinged with
theology and the defense mechanism of men who were
engaged in resisting taxes and other exactions was natu:
rally drawn from the literature with which they were most
familiar—the Old and the New Testament. ‘‘When the
monarchy was to be subverted,’ wrote a shrewd observer
of the age, ‘‘we knew what was necessary to justify the
fact.” All that was reasonable enough but the historian
need not tarry long with the logical devices of men in action.

In reality, the English Revolution of the seventeenth cen-
tury was a social transformation almost identical in its
essentials with the French Revolution of the next century:
a civilian laity emancipated itself from the mastery of.
Crown, aristocracy, and clergy. The process was long and
painful and during its course many preferred the uncertain-

32 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ties of distant colonization to the perils of domestic war.

It was under a government occupied with conflict at
home that all the colonies in America, except Georgia, were
founded; it was under a Parliament increasingly mercantile
in character that they grew into powerful economic and
political societies; and it was in the doctrines of John Locke,
philosopher of the ‘Glorious Revolution” of 1688, that
they found secular authority for their Declaration of Inde-
pendence in 1776. ‘Thus the social transformation of Eng-
land facilitated colonization, gave a practical economic turn
to imperial administration, and finally afforded the linguis-
tics of colonial revolution.

In all these things lay the secret of England’s expanding
power. She had a monarchy, strong but limited—dom-
inated at last by the middle classes rather than by courtiers
such as those who disported themselves at Versailles.
While Spain and France discarded their representative insti-
tutions, England retained her Lords and Commons and
made them potent agencies for commercial and industrial
promotion. Her Church, shattered by the endless multipli-
cation of sects, was early compelled to grant a certain
degree of toleration as the price of peace. ‘The state,
racked by two revolutions and subjected to the fire of
constant criticism, was forced to give up the censorship of
the press and fling wide the floodgates for intellectual inter-
ests of a secular cast.

In her social development, as in church and state, Eng-
land was rapidly moving toward the modern age. She had
a large and growing estate of merchants, a body of yeomen
ready for adventure, and a supply of free agricultural
laborers, men and women, loose from the feudal ties that
bound them to the soil. In short, England in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries was a nation engrossed in
applying ever-increasing energies to business enterprise—of
which colonization in the New World was one branch for
the employment of capital and administrative genius.

Chay te Rit

Laying the Structural Base of the American
Colonies

requirements, call for appropriate leadership. At the
forefront of imperial enterprise we see the soldier of
courage and martial design: a Genghis Khan sweeping with
his hordes over Mongolia and China; an Akbar overcoming
India’s millions; a Cortez cheering his soldiers to the fray
amid the flames of Montezuma’s capital. In the vanguard
of colonization, essentially a civilian undertaking, we find
the administrator with a vision and a mind for business
affairs: a Baltimore and a Penn raising capital, calling for
tenants, and attempting to build states by the sheer strength
of individual resources; a Gates, a Wingfield, and a Win-
throp associating themselves with mercantile corporations
to accomplish purposes beyond the power of any single
promoter; a Carver and a Bradford giving direction and
inspiration to a little band of Pilgrims breaking the stub-

born soil of Plymouth.
In the nature of things, daring leaders fearing no risk of

33 |

MPIRE building and colonization, each according to its

34 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

fortune had to break the way before judicious merchants
would invest their capital in dubious speculations beyond
the unknown sea. If among the forerunners who first
caught glimpses of England’s unique mission and feared
not the hazards of adventure, one must be taken by way
of illustration, the choice may very well fall upon Walter
Raleigh, son of a country gentleman, knighted for service
by Queen Elizabeth.

For the great undertaking in colonization, Raleigh’s
temper and early experience fitted him in a peculiar fashion.
Alive to all the important interests of his age, he was
fascinated by the multiplying tales ot exploration and dis-
covery. Humble geographers were among his friends. The
sea dogs, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had respect for
him; he was of their kind. In red scenes of battle, he had
showed his daring, helping the Dutch to defy the rule of
Spain and England’s gallant sailors to send the Armada to
the bottom of the ocean. Given to brooding upon high
enterprise, he pondered upon the destinies of nations,
sketching in fact during his later years a grand plan for a
philosophic history of the world. Such was the first archi-
tect of English colonial fortune who saw in his dreams the
American wilderness subdued by the people of his native
land.

Unshaken by the fate of his brave half-brother, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, who, returning from one of his voyages
of exploration, had perished in a storm, exclaiming as tradi-
tion has it, ‘‘we are as near to heaven by sea as by land,”’
Sir Walter Raleigh determined to plant under mild skies
on southern shores the beginning of a second England.
Cautious at first, he sent out at his own expense a scouting
expedition under Amadas and Barlowe who brought back
reports of a paradise along the Carolina coast. Then Sir
Walter sought the help of his sovereign and secured from
Elizabeth a wine monopoly yielding him revenues for ex-
perimentation, supplementing a grant of land in America
that promised to make him a feudal lord over a princely

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 35

realm. Twice from his own purse thus recruited and once
with the help of merchant capitalists, he attempted to estab-
lish a permanent agricultural settlement in America, not
overlooking the possibility of finding precious metals.

Misfortune of every kind dogged the steps of his ad-
venture, however, and at last, broken in estate, Raleigh
was compelled to accept the verdict of failure. “The empire
of which he dreamed was to be built by other hands in
other ways. ‘The treasuries of gold which his captains
sought were not to be found until, in the sweat of their
brow, American colonists had cut and tramped their way
across three thousand miles of forest, plain, desert, and
mountain to the far end of the continent. Instead of
precious metals Raleigh’s men discovered a more secure
foundation for a state had they but known it—the lowly
tobacco leaf and the humble potato. The pungent weed
was to furnish a currency no less certain than gold and
afford the staple crop for baronial estates where wealth and
leisure nourished a governing class capable of waging to a
victorious end a dramatic contest with the descendants of
the Raleighs, Leicesters, and Burleighs of the Elizabethan
age. The plain prose of economy in the long run is stranger
than the romance of fiction.

§

Though Raleigh failed, his experiments taught valuable
lessons and his spirit fired contemporaries with emulative
desire. If nothing more, he had proved that successful
colonization was, in the beginning at least, beyond the
strength and resources of any individual. The amount of
capital and the diversity of talent demanded made it of
necessity a cooperative undertaking, at all events until the
first difficulties were resolved and the path was blazed.
Thus it came about that the earliest permanent settlements
were made by commercial corporations.

Four American colonies owed their inception to trading

36 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

companies—two of English origin, a third under Dutch-
Walloon patronage, and a fourth under Swedish direction.
It was the London Company chartered in 1606 that led the
way by founding Virginia; it was the Massachusetts Bay
Company incorporated in 1629 that saved the little Plym-
outh fellowship from destruction and started New England
on its course. Ina fierce quest for trade, the Dutch West
India Company, established in 1621, laid in New Nether-
land the basis of a colony upon which the English forty-
three years later erected the province of New York. Not
to be outdone by Holland and England, the king of Sweden
called into being a West India Company of his own and
commissioned it to break ground for a Swedish state on the
banks of the Delaware.

In a certain sense Georgia may also be included among
the “Company” colonies. If the avowed purpose of its
principal promoter, James Oglethorpe, was philanthropic—
the establishment of an asylum for poor debtors—the legal
instrument for the realization of that design was a charter
granted by George II in 1732, uniting the sponsors of the
enterprise in “one body politic and corporate,” known as
the ‘“Trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in
America.” In form of government and in methods of
financing, the Georgia concern did not differ materially from
the trading Company. So it may be said that the corpora-
tion of capitalists—the instrument employed in commercial
undertakings—was the agency which planted the first suc-
cessful colonies and molded their early polity in church and
state and economy.

Now the commercial corporation for colonization,
whether it sprang from the sole motive of profit-making or
from mixed incentives, such as the prosecution of trade and
the spread of religious propaganda, was in reality a kind
of autonomous state. Like the state, it could endure indefi-
nitely—as long as its charter lasted; its members might die
but, by the continuous election of successors, the corpora-
tion went on. Like the state, it had a constitution, a

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE | 37

charter issued by the Crown, which formed a superior law
binding constituents and officers.

Like the state, it had a territorial basis—a grant of land
often greater in area than a score of European principali-
ties. It was a little democracy in itself, for its stockholders
admitted new members to the suffrage, elected their own
officers, and made by-laws. It exercised many functions
of a sovereign government: it could make assessments, coin
money, regulate trade, dispose of corporate property, col-.
lect taxes, manage a treasury, and provide for defense.
Thus every essential element long afterward found in the
government of the American state appeared in the char-
tered corporation that started English civilization in
America.

Moreover, that other great arm of the English state, the
Church, usually formed an integral part of these corporate
enterprises. As a matter of zeal in some instances and of
form in others, colonial companies were generally charged
with the duty of “propagating the Christian religion to such
people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of
the true knowledge and worship of God’’—to use the lan-
guage of the first Virginia charter. Either in fact or in
theory to conciliate high powers in England, this meant the
faith of the Anglican Church established by law. In the
Virginia colony, there was no doubt about the injunction:
the Company made the creed of that Church the strict rule
of the plantation. The first legislature assembled on the
soil of America, the Virginia House of Burgesses, en-
acted that ‘‘all persons whatsoever upon the Sabbath days
shall frequent divine service and sermons, both forenoon
and afternoon.”

§

Such was the nature of the agency created by James I in
1606 when he issued the first charter to the London Com-
pany commissioning it to establish the colony of Virginia.
Among the men whose enthusiasm called the corporation

38 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

into life were old and seasoned navigators, such as John
Smith and Ferdinando Gorges, who had seen America with
their own eyes, and industrious students of maritime enter-
prise, such as Richard Hakluyt, who had been affiliated
with Raleigh in his ill-starred experiments. Associated with
them were merchants, traders, landed gentlemen, and other
persons who knew little or nothing about America and
regarded the undertaking as primarily a profit-making
venture.

Though the investors insisted on works of piety among
the Indians, they wanted a quick return on their capital;
their colony was hardly a year old when they demanded a
piece of gold and threatened to forsake the settlers as
“banished men”’ if cargoes of goods worth two thousand
pounds were not immediately forthcoming. Neither the
stockholders nor the majority of the first emigrants had any
very definite idea of the labor, land, and administrative
systems required for successful colonization.

As a matter of fact the air of England was still charged
with vain imaginings awakened by Spanish luck. ‘Why,
man,” ran the lines of a play written in 1605 to laud the
glories of America, “‘all their dripping pans are pure golde,
and all the chaines with which they chaine up their streets
are massive gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered
in golde; and for rubies and diamonds, they goes forth in
holy dayes and gather ’hem by the sea-shore, to hang on
their children’s coates and stick in their children’s caps, as
commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches and
groates with holes in ’hem.”

With such wild tales afloat to stir the cupidity of the
avaricious, it was naturally the soldier of fortune who first
grasped at the opportunity of migrating to Virginia. The
directors of the Company tried to secure industrious and
God-fearing settlers, but, in the first group of one hundred
and five emigrants, there were only a few mechanics and
twelve laborers; about one-half were set down as “‘gentle-
men’”’ and four as carpenters—bound to a houseless wilder-

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 39

ness! The second expedition transported more gentlemen
and several goldsmiths, who filled the settlement with
clamor about riches until, as John Smith, who was on the
spot exclaimed, ‘“‘there was now no talk, no hope, no work,
but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold.” ‘The
third and fourth voyages brought more gentlemen, trades-
men, soldiers, and fortune hunters. Finally the exasperated
Captain Smith blurted out the bitter truth to the Company:
‘‘When you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty
carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths,
masons, and diggers up of trees’ roots, well provided, than
a thousand such as we have.”’

Indeed, among the early bands of emigrants only one
member, this Captain Smith, seems to have grasped the
true nature of colonial economy. Though most of his
charming tales, including the story of his rescue by Poca-
hontas, an Indian maid, are now discredited, and though
he is set down among the great romancers like Casanova
and Sancho Panza, Smith was keenly alive to the realities
of the struggle in Virginia. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, “‘is to be
expected thence, but by labor.”

Standing on that principle, Smith kept up a constant
demand for emigrants not afraid of soiling their hands, and
saved the day more than once by enforcing the rule that
those who would not work should not eat. Boastful and
unpopular as he was, Smith was personally brave in warfare
and fertile in practical plans for defending the settlement
and producing the means of livelihood. He led in explor-
ing and developing Virginia; when an explosion of gun-
powder severely wounded him and sent him back to England
for surgical attention, disease and famine almost wiped out
the colony. Nothing but the arrival of outside relief saved
the survivors from utter ruin. The Company demanded
gold of Smith; he gave it something more valuable, a map
of the region, a sketch of its resources, and sound advice
as to the kind of emigrants suitable for colonization.

In fashioning its land policy, the Virginia Company was

40 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

forced to shape its scheme of tenure to the varied character
of its emigrants. Having in mind the matter of quick
profits, the condition of the free laborers available for
transport, and the requirements of independent capitalists
desirous of engaging in agriculture on their own account,
the Company provided a combination of corporate and indi-
vidual ownership. In the first place, the directors decided
that a part of the land should be held permanently by the
Company and tilled by servants sent out at its expense.
Under this arrangement, the corporation was to furnish
the implements and initial supplies; each able-bodied servant
was to work at the task assigned to him; the proceeds were
to go into a common store from which allotments were to
be made to the laborers according to their needs and profits
to the Company according to its investment.

In the second place, a large portion of the land was
devoted to individual exploitation, known as ‘‘the adventure
of the purse.” Every contributor who paid a fixed sum of
£12.10s. into the corporate treasury was entitled to a
warrant for one hundred acres of land and an equal amount
in addition as soon as the first lot was under cultivation.
To encourage the migration of settlers capable of paying
their passage and launching themselves, the Company of-
fered a hundred acres to every adventurer who would risk
the hazards of Virginia in person. Any capitalist who
transported one laborer to the colony at his own expense
was granted one hundred acres and an equal area for each
additional laborer so transported—an allowance later re-
duced to fifty acres—always subject to an annual quit-
rent of two shillings per hundred acres payable to the
corporation.

Finally great sections of land were set aside to afford
incomes for the Company’s officers in Virginia with a view
to supporting them in a certain degree of style; and huge
grants were made from time to time to individuals for
‘meritorious services,” an elastic phrase that covered a
multitude of sins. In the main the Company desired to

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 41

create a colony of estates moderate in size; but, when the
enterprising spirits who crossed the sea discovered how easy
it was to stake out princely dominions, they managed by
one means or another to engross within a short time all
the lands on the seaboard and transform them into large
plantations, thus forcing the small freeholders up into the
piedmont.

Of these several schemes, that of tillage by servants sent
out at the Company’s expense proved to be the most evident
failure. Supervision was difficult, for the colony was far
away. There was little incentive to the laborer to put forth
his best efforts because the results of his toil flowed into the
corporation’s warehouse and he gained little for himself
beyond a bare subsistence.

Wretched idleness was the fruit of this program. Some
improvement was made in 1611 when Governor Dale set
apart three acres of land for each company laborer, gave
him one month of free time in which to cultivate his own
plot, and allowed him a small stock of corn from the com-
mon store. But even this change could not save the system
of Company tillage. It was too repellent to attract settlers;
it lacked the element of direct and personal supervision;
and at the end of ten years there was only a handful of
laborers, men, women, and children, operating under the
plan. By that time, the experiment had made it clear that
no corporation with its seat in London could successfully
carry on planting in America by ill-requited workers sent
out at its expense and managed by its agents three thousand
miles away. So within a short time the development of
planting in the lowlands of Virginia inevitably fell into the
hands of individual landowners who secured estates by
investment, purchase, or grant, as indicated above, and
obtained by one process or another laborers—freemen,
bond servants, or slaves—to cultivate their acres.

In the sphere of government, as well as economy, the
experience of the Virginia Company was full of profit for
the generations to come. Until near the end of its troubled

42 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

life, it suffered from the delusion that Englishmen who had
enjoyed some share in the politics of their native land could
be permanently and happily ruled by governors chosen in
London and sent over with a retinue of servants. None of
the three charters granted to the corporation, 1606, 1609,
and 1612, contemplated any degree of autonomy in the
colony itself. In the contest with the Crown, the rights of
the Company and its stockholders were enlarged, but to
the end the settlers in Virginia remained legally subjected
in all important things to the will of the distant corporation.

Governor after governor was dispatched to manage the
settlement in the name of the Company: Delaware with the
pomp of an Oriental potentate; Dale, harsh, brutal, and
“efhicient’’; Argall, a petty tyrant who robbed the settlers
and cheated the corporation; Yeardley, a liberal gentleman
who “applied himself for the most part in planting to-
bacco’; and Wyatt, during whose five years of service the
colony passed from the Company to the Crown. Some of
these governors displayed conspicuous merits, but they all
owed their appointments to politics and intrigues, not to
demonstrated competence in administration.

With quaint irony Captain Smith told the story: “The
multiplicity of Governors is a great damage to any state;
but the uncertain daily changes are burdensome, because
their entertainments are chargeable, and many will make
hay whilst the sun doth shine, however it shall fare with
the generality.” Not until the Company became engaged
in a violent quarrel with the Crown did it, with a gesture
of magnanimity, seek an alliance with the colonists and by
the establishment of the House of Burgesses in 1619 grant
them a voice in local government.

While the London Company was feeling its way to
policies that promised success, the colonists in Virginia were
learning their own lessons in days full of trouble. The
first summer for them at Jamestown in 1607 was one long,
drawn-out agony, unbearable heat, unwholesome water,
and spoiling food striking them down with disease and

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 43

death. One brief extract from the record of Master
George Percy, who looked upon the tragic scene with his
own eyes, tells the gruesome story: ‘‘The fifteenth day,
their died Edward Browne and Stephen Galthorpe. The
sixteenth day, their died Thomas Gower Gentleman. The
seventeenth day, their died Thomas Mounslie. The eight-
eenth day their died Robert Pennington, and John Martine,
Gentlemen.’ So the little lives of men were ticked off;
when autumn came half the brave and tempestuous band
were in their graves.

Those who lived through the awful days quarreled and
plotted conspiracies. Governor Dale introduced martial
law, hanged, shot, and broke men on the wheel; he chained
one malefactor to a tree with a bodkin through his tongue
and kept him there till he died; but with all his cruelty the
governor was hardly able to suppress disorder. To pesti-
lence and turbulence were added occasional famines. In the
“starving time’ of 1609 a colony of nearly five hundred
persons was reduced in the course of six months to sixty
wretched survivors, desperately preparing to leave the scene
of their sufferings forever, when relief ships arrived from
England. Collisions with the Indians—individual brushes
and general conflicts such as the awful massacre of 1622
which swept off three hundred men, women, and children
at one dreadful stroke—thinned the ranks of the settlers
and held the tiny colony always under the shadow of fear.
It is estimated that all in all the Company sent over 5,649
emigrants during its existence from 1606 to 1624, and that
of these only 1,095 were in the colony at the end of the
period. Some had fled back to England disillusioned; most
of them had perished in Virginia.

And yet during these two decades, in spite of every
obstacle, the foundations of a prosperous colony were laid
as homes were built, the labor supply enlarged, and a profit-
able crop developed. Early in these years, the fundamental
element—European domestic life—which so distinguished
the English colonies, was introduced; for two white women

44. THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

came with the second supply ship in 1608, ‘“‘Mistresse
Forest and Anne Buras, her maide.”’

Recognizing the importance of permanent ties binding
the colonists to America, the Company itself undertook to
encourage the migration of women; in 1619 it sent at its
own risk ninety maidens, ‘‘agreeable persons, young and
incorrupt,’’ and “sold them with their own consent to set-
tlers as wives at the cost of their transportation.’ Since
this venture yielded a fair prefit to the Company besides
wielding a moderating influence on the turbulence of the
men, other consignments of women were sent from year
to year—sometimes with great difficulty, because it was no
easy thing to induce comely English maidens “‘of virtuous
education, young, handsome, and well-recommended” to
tempt fortune by searching for a good husband among the
hustling planters who pressed around the landing stage and
offered the purchase money in tobacco. Though the process
was rough and ready, it helped to fill Virginia with homes
and, as Lord Delaware, the governor, once remarked, with
“honest laborers burdened with children.” When in the
course of time life in the province became reasonably secure,
emigrants of every kind took wives and children with them;
and so, at the end of thirty years, there rose in Virginia a
generation born on the soil, who could not say with
their progenitors, ‘‘Lord, bless England, our sweet native
country.”

The second element essential to the prosperity of the land-
owners, an abundant supply of workers willing to till plan-
tations under the hot sun of Virginia, was even harder to
get, but before the close of the Company’s career a solution
of that problem was found. At the very outset the corpora-
tion adopted a practice of sending over on its own account
‘indentured servants” bound to labor for a term of years,
thereby setting an example which was quickly followed by
adventurers of the purse and other colonists who bought
land from the Company. Some of these laborers, men and
women, boys and girls alike, were lured on shipboard by

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 45

kidnapping ‘‘spirits’’ and borne to sea before they knew
their destination and their fate. Others were convicts de-
ported because English judges wanted to get rid of them.
Thousands were simply knocked down on the streets of
English cities and dragged away by brutal bands which
made a regular business of that nefarious trafic. To these
bond servants were soon added Negro slaves, the first of
whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619,
but this new class did not become very numerous until the
lapse of half a century. For fifty years, indentured white
servants from England furnished most of the labor for the
fields.

A special impetus was given to the economic life of
Virginia by the discovery of a single staple that could
be grown easily in large quantities and exchanged readily
for cash and goods, namely, ‘‘the obnoxious weed,” tobacco.
Very early the settlers learned that little money was to be
made by raising corn or making iron and glass; therefore,
they turned almost as one man to the cultivation of tobacco,
planting it even in the streets of Jamestown. Great for-
tunes, equivalent in a few instances to $75,000 a year in
present currency, were taken from tobacco crops and the
head of every adventurer seems to have been turned by the
prospect of sudden riches. One who was on the ground in
the early days exclaimed that “‘tobacco onely was the busi-
ness and for ought that I could hear every man madded
upon that and little thought or looked for anything else.”’

In addition to bringing quick prosperity, tobacco gave a
decided bent to the course of social development in the
South; it determined that the land, especially on the sea-
board, should be tilled primarily, not by small freeholders
such as settled in New England, but rather by servile labor
directed by the lords of great estates, with all the implica-
tions, legal, moral, and intellectual, thereunto appertaining.
So the tobacco plant unfolding its broad leaves in the moist
air and hot sun of Virginia gave a direction to economy
that was big with fate.

46 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The growing prosperity of Virginia, instead of yielding
wealth and security to the Company, only added to its
troubles. As the population increased in size difficulties of
administration multiplied and these in turn aggravated
the dissensions that constantly raged in London. Every
part of the social order in England was now being shaken
by a conflict between the Crown and the titled aristocracy
on one side and merchants and minor gentry on the other,
a conflict that was in a few years to break out into civil war
and revolution. Each party to this controversy had its
spokesmen in the Virginia Company rending its transactions
with angry disputes. The mercantile element, prominent
both in the corporation and in the House of Commons,
steadily opposed all high notions of royal prerogative and
all arbitrary schemes of taxation.

Unable to abolish Parliament, the king, James I, resent-
fully turned his wrath against the Company. Judicial pro-
ceedings were instituted calling for the forfeiture of its
charter; the case was heard by judges appointed by the
king to serve his interests; the conclusion was foregone.
In 1624, the charter was annulled and the colony became
a royal province administered directly under the king’s
authority. After sinking £150,000 in an unprofitable specu-
lation but making experiments that pointed the way to
successful colonization, the Company thus came to an
ignominious end. Yet for the moment no radical changes
were made in the economic and political life of Virginia.
The last executive sent over by the corporation was con-
tinued in office as a royal appointee; the affairs of Virginia
were managed by a royal governor aided by a small council
designated by the Crown and the House of Burgesses
elected by the planters.

Such were the beginnings of the colony which historians
are accustomed to contrast with Puritan New England as
if it were a secular enterprise carried out by freethinkers.
As a matter of fact, if records are to be taken at face value,
“neither the desire for treasure nor even the wish to pro-

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 47

mote the power of England” was the chief object of the
Virginia Company; its heart was set on the glory of God
and the propagation of the Christian faith among them that
sat in darkness. In their advertisements for colonists the
oficers of the Company were at pains to indicate that they
wished only settlers of correct religious life. ‘They also
made careful provision for the maintenance of the religious
habits they prized so highly; churches were built with such
elaboration as their means allowed, and the practice of
attending the daily services there was carefully enforced.
The whole work of colonization was treated as an enter-
prise in which it was a work of piety to engage and collec-
tions were made in parish churches for the college that was
planned for the English and the Indians at the Henrico
settlement.”’

Moreover, the House of Burgesses elected by the free-
holders of Virginia was in complete accord with the religious
professions of the Company and the Crown. It required
the church wardens to report for trial ‘‘all who led profane
and ungodly lives, common swearers and drunkards, adul-
terers, fornicators, slanderers, tale-bearers; all such as ‘do
not behave themselves orderly and soberly during divine
services, and all masters and mistresses delinquent in
catechising children and ‘ignorant persons’ placed under
their charge.”

It is true that the records of Virginia are not sown with
Biblical quotations and with references to the wonder-
working providence of God, but if statutes, orders, and
decrees meant anything at all, then Virginia was as pious
as Massachusetts and as devout as Plymouth. Indeed, it
must not be forgotten that the Pilgrims originally arranged
with the Virginia Company to settle on its soil and that the
prospect of securing the accession of this new group of
recruits was welcomed by leading members of the corpora-
tion. The Pilgrims, in spite of their “perversity” in re-
ligious faith, were just the kind of sturdy and sober laborers
so eagerly sought by the Company and it was merely an

48 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

accident in navigation that carried them to land outside the
borders of Virginia.

Tangible circumstances, rather than a difference in the
motives of the London merchants who advanced capital for
colonial enterprises, accounted for the contrast between
Virginia and Plymouth. ‘The climate and soil of the north-
ern coast, besides being unfit for plantations, afforded no
single staple upon which a fortune could be swiftly built;
and the bulk of the emigrants for the New England colony
was drawn from sources other than those exploited by the
Virginia Company. Most of the Pilgrims who settled
Plymouth were petty farmers, laborers, and artisans, rather
than gentlemen, yeomen, and merchants with pounds to risk
in importing servants and slaves.

Even those who came by way of Holland to Cape Cod
had seen toilsome days and nights in their alien home.
When, as Separatists, they collided with the Church of
England and fled across the North Sea, they were forced
to learn various trades in their new abode by which to eke
out a living. Hence with their sobriety and profound re-
ligious faith, the Pilgrims combined a knowledge of agri-
culture and handicrafts. Moreover, they were accustomed
to the severest hardships. As the Dutch craft guilds ex-
cluded them from the most remunerative trades, they were
able to earn a living while in Holland only by the heaviest
manual labor for twelve or fifteen hours a day. Bradford,
historian of the little band, recorded that no “newfangled-
ness or other such like giddie humor” inclined them to move
to some other land.

In enumerating the ‘‘sundrie weightie and solid reasons”’
for migration, he declared that the Pilgrims found by ex-
perience ‘‘the hardnes of the place and countrie to be such
as few in comparison would come to them and fewer still
would bide it out and continew with them. For many that
came to them and many more that desired to be with them

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 49

could not endure that great labor and hard fare with other
inconveniences which they underwent and were contented
with.” Additional reasons for migration given by the
chronicler were the oppression of their children who, under
heavy duties, became decrepit in early life, and the danger
of falling into ungodly ways through contact with those
of other faith or no faith at all. Men, women, and youths
accustomed to toil long hours at humble crafts in Holland
had the will and the strength required to cope with the hard-
ships of colonization in a new country.

But as the Separatists were without sufficient capital to
take the great step, it became necessary for them to enter
into negotiation with a group of London merchants in order
to secure land, ships, supplies, and temporary maintenance.
From the London Company they got permission to settle
within the boundaries of Virginia and, after much haggling,
they came to terms with certain merchant adventurers
willing to invest money in their enterprise. A loose stock
company was formed in which emigrants and capitalists
were united. Every person over sixteen who went out on
the expedition automatically became a stockholder and
received one share valued at £10; two children between ten
and sixteen were regarded as equivalent to the value of
one share. The emigrants themselves were also allowed to
buy additional stock with money or goods. The remainder
of the capital was furnished by regular investors, chiefly
Londoners. As a guarantee to the capitalists the whole
body of emigrants bound themselves under the terms of
an agreement to work for a period of seven years, to put
their produce into a common warehouse, and to receive
their subsistence out of the common store—all on the under-
standing that at the end of the period there should be a
settlement and a discharge of the obligations.

Having accepted the harsh conditions of their bondage,
a little band of Pilgrims set sail in the Speedwell from
Delftshaven in the summer of 1620, and joined by another
party in the Mayflower at Southampton, they put to sea.

Sy UMS AD Ao RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Finding their first ship unfit for the journey, they soon
returned to port, where a few discontented emigrants gave
up the voyage, while the others crowded into the May-
flower. At last, “all being compacte toegeather in one
shipe,’ free and bond, they dropped out of Plymouth
harbor in September.

After weathering many cross winds and fierce storms
that shook every timber of their little bark and after wit-
nessing “‘many specialle workes of God’s providence,” they
found themselves on November 6 in sight of land far to
the north, out of the limits of the Virginia territory where
- they had permission to settle. For many days they eagerly
searched the coast and finally, on December 21, they made
their formal landing at Plymouth harbor.

Before leaving the ship, forty-one adult males in the
company—the Pilgrim ‘‘fathers,” most of whom were'
under forty—by a solemn compact bound themselves
into a body politic, agreeing to enact and abide by laws and
ordinances for the general good. Having chosen John
Carver, ‘‘a man godly and well approved amongst them,”’
governor for a year, they were ready to confront “the
grimme and grislie face of povertie.”’ Soon the cold gray
New England winter closed down upon them and before
summer came again, out of “100 and odd persons, scarce
50 remained.” Yet all through those trying days in the
shadow of death they cut trees and built log houses; and
when the planting season arrived, they put out twenty acres
of corn under the direction of friendly Indians who had
visited them during the winter of their adversity, and
taught them the arts of forest and field and stream.

From time to time small additions of immigrants were
made to the little settlement at Plymouth but it was not des-
tined to grow into a great state like Virginia. It was
limited in capital; the number of radical Separatists upon
which it could draw for labor was small; and there was no
local staple such as tobacco which could be poured into
London markets in large quantities. At the end of seven

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE a4

_ decades, when Plymouth was absorbed into Massachusetts
under the charter of 1691, it had only seven thousand
inhabitants.

In reality, therefore, the record at Plymouth filled no
great page in the history of commonwealths. Like the
annals of the poor, it was short and simple. Farming was
supplemented by fur trading, fishing, and lumbering, which
furnished cargoes for the return voyages. On the lapse
of the third year, the system of common tillage which
rewarded idleness and penalized industry was given up;
and each family was allotted a certain amount of land for
cultivation. After chafing three years more under bondage
to the London merchants, the old contract was set aside and
the colonists bought outright all the claims of the original
investors.

Although they thus adopted the idea of individual prop-
erty in land, the Plymouth settlers maintained a high degree
of collective control in the name of the common good. The
most minute affairs of private life were subject to the
searching scrutiny of the elders; prying, spying, and inform-
ing were raised to the height of prime diversions; swift and
stern punishment was visited upon all who were guilty of
blasphemy, drunkenness, sloth, or irregular conduct. Still
the regimen was not without relief. Smoking was per-
mitted; good beer was brewed; “strong waters’ were con-
sumed in liberal quantities; and after a while excellent wines
were imported from abroad. Within a few years all the
Pilgrims had better houses and a more liberal stock of
worldly goods than they had been accustomed to in their
native land. Beautiful villages rose amid spreading elms
and prosperous merchants plumed themselves on lucky
voyages. In fact, some of the more fortunate put on airs
and set themselves down in the records as ‘‘gentlemen,”’
over against the simplemen who had no titles or honors.
This was, of course, without prescriptive warrant for few,
if any, of them belonged to the gentry in the technical sense,
but it gratified an innate passion for ‘“‘qualitie,” and gave

52 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a certain artificial diversity to an otherwise plain social
order.

The tiny religious brotherhood of Plymouth was only ten
years old when settlements began to appear in the region to
the north under the auspices of a great mercantile
corporation chartered in 1629 as the Massachusetts Bay
Company. What a strange contrast the two enterprises
presented! The humble farmers, laborers, and artisans
who, with their families, composed the bulk of the settlers
on Cape Cod belonged to an outlawed religious band. In
the eyes of the bishop of London, such sectaries were con-
temptible trouble-makers, “instructed by guides fit for them,
cobblers, tailors, feltmakers, and such-like trash.”

On the other hand, the emigrants who founded the Bay
Colony belonged to the middle strata of English society.
They were not radicals in religion; they wanted moderate
reforms in the Church of England but no revolution. They
were not dependent for capital upon the good graces of
London investors; they were people of substance them-
selves. A few of them possessed large landed estates in
England; some were wealthy merchants; others came from
the professional classes; many were scholars of light and
learning from the universities; the majority were at first
drawn from the yeomanry and renters of farms in the
eastern counties of England. On the roll of this Company
were the names of Sir Henry Roswell, Sir John Young, -
Sir Richard Saltonstall, John Endicott, John Winthrop, and
other representatives of the landed gentry and commercial
classes—the virile and sturdy stock that, as we have said,
gave England its Cromwells, Hampdens, and Pyms.

Unlike the Plymouth band, the Massachusetts Company
had a formal charter of incorporation from the king. Its
members in the manner of such commercial corporations
were authorized to enlarge their number, elect a governor
and his assistants, make laws, dispose of the immense

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 5S

domain of land granted to them, and engage in almost
every kind of local economic enterprise. In short, it was
a corporation knit together by ties of religious sympathy,
endowed with abundant capital, and supplied with capable
leadership in things economic, legal, and spiritual.

Though it had the general form of the recently extin-
guished Virginia Company, it differed from that concern
in one vital particular; the seat of the corporation, the
majority of the stockholders, and the charter of legality
were all transferred to America. Instead of trying to
plant and govern a colony beyond the sea, the Massachu-
setts Company came over itself to the scene of action,
directed the labors of the planters, and participated im-
mediately in every phase of the enterprise. It was in truth,
therefore, an actual self-governing state set up in the New
World.

In the spring of 1630, John Winthrop, at the head of a
great band of Puritan gentlemen and yeomen, with their
families and a goodly body of indentured white servants,
sailed with a fleet of ships for the New World, thus be-
ginning a general exodus that lasted for about two decades
—the period of turmoil and revolution in England. During
the year in which he granted the charter to the new cor-
poration, Charles I began to rule his subjects without
Parliament; and for eleven years he laid taxes, imprisoned
objectors, and collected forced loans on his own authority.
England seemed headed for a despotism.

‘Deprived of their voice in the House of Commons, the
landed gentry of the middle rank, the yeomen, the mer-
chants, and the artisans on whom the burden of the royal
exactions fell, were now roused to revolutionary fervor.
Those who belonged to the fighting school of the Cromwells
and the Hampdens raised the standard of revolt, waged
seven years of war, and finally brought the king to the
scaffold at Whitehall. Others, despairing of freedom and
victory at home, decided to migrate in search of liberty to
the New World. They sold their estates, wound up their

$4 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

affairs, assembled their servants and laborers, and trans-
ferred their capital and their energy to another sphere—the
new settlements springing up at Boston, Charlestown,
Salem, and in the neighboring regions.

These Bay colonists carried with them livestock, tools,
great stores of supplies, and goods for trading with the
Indians, the capital for large economic enterprise. Beyond
question, their leaders desired to reproduce in America the
stratified society that they had known in England, excepting
the titled aristocracy which stood above them in rank and
in the affections of the king. If they had not encountered
obstacles, they would have made Massachusetts a land of
estates tilled by renters and laborers, with yeomen free-
holders interspersed and the home of an Established Church
directed by a learned clergy according to English forms,
though ‘‘purified” to suit the taste and temper of the
emigrants. ‘We will not say,’ exclaimed a Puritan leader
in the first great expedition, ‘‘as the Separatists were wont
to say at their leaving of England, Farewell Babylon, fare-
well Rome! but we will say, farewell, dear England!
farewell the Church of God in England and all the Chris-
tian friends there!” Rich in this world’s goods, rich in the
religious learning of the schools, imbued with a firm belief
in the proper subordination of the lower ranks, and en-
dowed with a charter of self-government, the directors of
the Massachusetts Company embarked on their great
experiment.

As the Massachusetts Bay Colony grew in numbers and
prospered, the drift of affairs in the open air of the New
World indicated a decided bent in its religious and economic
life. Now far removed from the discipline of Anglican
bishops and the ambitions of the Anglican clergy, the
Puritans floated off into independency, each of the little
churches becoming a sovereign congregation before many
years had elapsed. Varying likewise from original designs,
the course of rural economy ran somewhat contrary to the
expectations of those wealthy managers who hoped to see

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE oD

the establishment of large estates tilled by tenants, laborers,
or bondmen.

Here, too, circumstances rather than theory proved to
be the decisive element: the climate and soil of New Eng-
land, coupled with an abundance of land and scarcity of
labor, made anything like feudalism impossible. It was not
because the Puritans had objections to servitude or slavery
that they turned from this type of agriculture; they held
indentured white servants, tried to enslave the Indians, and
used Negro bondmen wherever profitable. It was be-
cause they found that in a land of long winters, stony fields,
and diversified crops, chattel bondage on a large scale was
economically impossible. Controlled by factors beyond
their mastery, the Puritans therefore spread over New Eng-
land under the leadership of freehold farmers; and those
who could not endure that arduous career or had no love
for a toilsome life among hills and rocks, found an outlet
for their capital and energies upon the high seas. From
fisheries, the sacred cod and the bulky whale, and from
traflicking in ports far and near, the economic directors of
New England, whose descendants were to try their mettle
with the descendants of Virginia planters in forum and field,
accumulated fortunes rivaling in size the riches wrung from
the spreading tobacco leaves of the Old Dominion.

These economic factors in turn had a profound effect
upon the spirit and procedure of government. Broadly
speaking, the political experience of the gentlemen, yeomen,
and merchants who came to New England had been no
different from that of the dominant classes in Virginia, but
their settlement in communities rather than on plantations
made the small, compact town, not the county, the unit of
political life. As all but church members were for sixty
years excluded from the suffrage in Massachusetts, the
village church and state became identical—the democratic
tendencies of the free congregation accustomed to prayer
and exhortation aiding the process of government by
discussion.

56 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

After the towns had multiplied and meetings of the entire
Massachusetts Bay Company at one place became trouble-
some, a representative system based upon the division into
communities was introduced in 1634. Henceforward each
town in open meeting, usually with much debate, elected
one or two members to speak for it in the general court of
the commonwealth. Soon every village had its statesmen
prepared to discuss on a moment’s notice any question of
theology and politics, giving to the whole body corporate
the tone of the community and congregation.

§

The niggardly soil, the severe life, and the religious rigor
of Massachusetts forced migration, which in time founded
the colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hamp-
shire. From religious controversies led by two intransigent
radicals, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, sprang the
first of these offshoots. Williams, a scholar from Cam-
bridge who came to America in 1631 as a refugee from the
autocratic rule of Archbishop Laud, ecclesiastical servant of
Charles I, brought with him a theory of life and conduct
disturbing to the system of Massachusetts as it had been
to old England. He was a pioneer among the bold thinkers
of the world in proclaiming religious toleration on prin-
ciple rather than on expediency.

In Williams’ creed were four cardinal points. First was
the doctrine that “persecution for cause of conscience is
most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of
Christ Jesus.” From this simple declaration it followed
that ‘“‘no one should be bound to worship or to maintain
a worship against his own consent.” Williams’ third
principle was that church and state should be separated,
that to limit the choice of civil magistrates to church mem-
bers was like choosing pilots and physicians according to
their schemes of salvation rather than skill in their pro-
fessions. Finally, the civil magistrate was not to interfere

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 57

at all in matters of conscience; “his power extends only
to the bodies and goods of men.” Thus the ferment which
produced Puritanism produced also the inquiring mind that
denied the essential doctrine of all dogmatic faiths—uni-
versal conformity.

‘Like Roger Williams or worse,” as the perplexed Win-
throp exclaimed, was Anne Hutchinson, who landed three
years after the young Cambridge scholar. Mrs. Hutchinson
was a woman of high courage, fine character, good family,
and undoubted ability—‘‘of ready wit and bold spirit,”
complained the governor whose supremacy she rejected.
According to the faithful she brought over with her ‘‘two
dangerous errors’. She espoused the doctrine of justifica-
tion by faith and declared that the Holy Ghost dwells in
every believer. She also cut at the roots of established
Puritanism, for she maintained the sovereignty of private
judgment in matters religious against the fulminations of
the clergy and the penalties of the civil magistrates. Such
sentiments, intolerable enough to the authorities of Massa-
chusetts when avowed by a man, were doubly outrageous
in their eyes when disclosed by a woman of “feminist”
temperament. It soon became evident that there was no
room in Massachusetts for people like Williams and Hutch-
inson, no more than there would have been under the
Established Church of Virginia or under the Holy Inquisi-
tion of Spain. So they were both banished from the land
of the last word and the final good.

Williams, after spending a terrible winter of privation
in the forests, gathered five companions around him and
founded in 1636 the settlement of Providence at the head
of Narragansett Bay. Two years later, Mrs. Hutchinson,
fleeing from the same wrath, planted a colony at Ports-
mouth. In the path of the pioneers came many sectaries,
most of them humble farmers and laborers who chafed
under the strict rule of the Massachusetts gentry and clergy
as the Puritans had chafed under the dominion of Charles I,
Archbishop Laud, and the aristocracy.

58 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Out of this movement, away from the Bay, sprang the
colony of Rhode Island—a union of many towns which was
granted a royal charter by Charles II in 1663. Soon dis-
contented with the restrictions imposed by forests and rocky
hills, enterprising pioneers of the new settlement took to
the sea in ships built by their own hands, and many of them
waxed rich distilling West Indian molasses into rum and
exchanging rum for slaves to be carried to the Southern
plantations. ‘‘Distillery is the main hinge upon which the
trade of the colony turns,’ averred the Governor and
Company on the eve of the American Revolution.

In the settlement of Connecticut, the second offshoot of
Massachusetts, religious controversy also formed an ele-
ment, but it was not the chief factor. As soon as the land
around Massachusetts Bay was all taken up, adventurers
began searching for better soil, and it was not long before
they heard of the wonderful Connecticut River country far
to the west. So they went forth to see and to possess.
In the winter of 1635-36 an advance guard, driving cattle
and carrying their household goods, journeyed overland
through the forests to the new Canaan, where, in the cov-
eted valley, they planted the three towns of Hartford,
Windsor, and Wethersfield. Under the spiritual guidance
of ‘‘the son of Thunder,’ Thomas Hooker, they reproduced
in the main the religious policy of the mother colony; and
under the indomitable John Mason they fell upon the
neighboring Pequods, exterminating them by sword and
fire. Inspired by their inherited or acquired talent for
communal management, they drew up in 1639 their Funda-
mental Orders, characterized as “‘the first written consti-
tution known to history that created a government.”

About the same time other Puritans under the leader-
ship of a rich London merchant, Theophilus Eaton, and
a famous divine, John Davenport, planted tiny settlements
at New Haven and other points along the Sound—self-
governing towns which in due course were federated under a
written constitution, known as the Fundamental Articles—

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 59

a system based on the faith that the Scriptures held forth
a perfect rule for the government of all men in church and
state and family. In 1662 the two little commonwealths
were fused into one colony under a royal charter constitut-
ing the ‘“‘“company and society of our colony of Connecticut
in America . . . one body corporate and politic in fact and
name by the name of Governor and Company of the Eng-
lish Colony of Connecticut in New England, in America.”

Other settlements flung off from Massachusetts beyond
the Merrimac River grew into a thriving colony which in
1679 was cut away from the parent stem and erected into
the royal province of New Hampshire.

§

Among the men of affairs who watched the colonizing
experiments in America was a discreet and shrewd Catholic
gentleman from Yorkshire, Sir George Calvert, who had
risen high in the service of the Crown by the display of
talents and complaisance. He was an investor in the stocks
of the Virginia Company and when he was driven from the
court by the intrigue of another favorite, he consoled
himself with elevation to the peerage, as Lord Baltimore,
a large sum of money, and adventures in the New World.
After some futile tests in Newfoundland, he visited Vir-
ginia; and pleased by the milder climate of that region, he
obtained from Charles I an immense grant of land in the
neighborhood, which he named Maryland in honor of the
king’s French wife, Henrietta Maria.

By the terms of the charter, Lord Baltimore and his heirs
and assigns were made “the true and absolute lords and
proprietaries”” of the land granted, on the condition of
yielding annually to the Crown two Indian arrowheads and
one-fifth of the gold and silver ore found in the colony.
By the same terms, the proprietor became captain-general
of the armed forces, head of the Church, and disposer of
all offices, civil and clerical. Besides being authorized to

60 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

create freehold estates, he was given the express right to
establish a medieval system in the New World by granting
manors to vassal lords subject to feudal obligations. These
high and extensive powers were, however, tempered by the
provision that laws should be made with the consent of the
freemen or their representatives. Before this significant
document could be signed by the king, the first Lord Balti-
more died and the parchment duly sealed passed to his heir,
Cecilius Calvert, in June, 1632.

From first to last the Maryland colony was viewed by the
Baltimores largely as an economic venture; they invested
heavily in it and in time derived an enormous annual reve-
nue fromit. At the outset the second Lord Baltimore made
provision for various types of immigrants qualified to
develop his immense domain on a profitable basis. Heading
his program was the allotment of one thousand acres to
every gentleman who would transport five able men with
supplies and an additional thousand acres for every addi-
tional group of five men brought overseas—each such estate
to be erected into a manor ‘with all such royalties and
privileges as are usually belonging to manors in England.”
In the second place, units of fifty and one hundred acres
were offered to men and women who came at their own
expense, with extra allowances for wives, children, and
servants. All lands so granted were to pay a perpetual
annual quitrent to the proprietary. With a view to bring-
ing the soil quickly into cultivation, a special form of in-
denture was drafted for bond servants, and in a short time
Negro slavery was introduced. Thus Maryland became a
semi-feudal dominion, composed in part of manors owned
by great landlords and tilled by white bond servants,
tenants, and slaves, and in part of small freeholds cultivated
by farmers of the middling order.

In planning his colony, Lord Baltimore adopted the
broad principle of religious toleration. Holding a charter
from a Protestant king, jealously watched by a nation in
which the tide of Puritanism was rising high, he could not

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 61

possibly hope to erect a purely Catholic community in
Maryland. Indeed, his charter, strictly interpreted, con-
templated the migration of no Catholics at all, for even
their existence in England was without the sanction of law.
Yet, being loyal to Rome, Lord Baltimore could hardly
close his dominions to his own brethren; on the contrary,
his first appeal for emigrants among the gentry seems to
have been made mainly to persons of his own creed.

Nevertheless, discretion appears to have been the rule
for all the Baltimores; only by the exercise of ingenuity
could they expect to hold their property in the midst. of
the religious disputes that rent the English nation at home
and filled with turmoil the colonies in the New World.
In the original charter, drawn by the hand of the first
Lord Baltimore, it was expressly provided that churches
built in the colony were to be consecrated ‘‘according to
the ecclesiastical laws of England”’; thus, in form at least,
the Protestant religion of the Established Church was.to be
the lawful religion of Maryland.

The successors of the original Lord Baltimore were
equally circumspect. The son and heir in his instructions
to the first governor and commissioners warned them that
on the expedition over the sea they should suffer no offense
or scandal to be given to any of the Protestants. By way
of precaution, he ordered them to “‘cause all acts of Roman
Catholic Religion to be done as privately as may be,” and to
“instruct all the Roman Catholics to be silent upon all
occasions of discourse concerning matters of religion.”
Sensing troubles ahead, he told them that, in opening their
ticklish dealings with Anglican Virginia, they should choose
as their messenger ‘‘one as is conformable to the Church of
England.”

When, in 1642, the arbitrary personal government of
Charles I had come to an end and England had launched
upon the course of revolution, Lord Baltimore was quick
to discover a storm blowing in his direction; so he wrote
to his governor in Maryland, “that no ecclesiastic in the

62 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

province ought to expect, nor is Lord Baltimore, nor any
of his officers, although they are Roman Catholics, obliged
in conscience to allow such ecclesiastics any more, or other,
privileges, exemptions, or immunities for their persons,
lands, or goods, than is allowed by His Majesty or other
officers to like persons in England’—that is, lawfully, none
at all. When the second revolution drove the Catholic
James II from the throne of England in 1688, the Balti-
more family lost its lucrative colony of Maryland. After a
lapse of twenty years, Benedict Leonard Calvert, finding
recovery on the old terms impossible, abandoned the re-
ligious faith of his ancestors and, by this act of apostacy,
won back for his heirs and assigns their fruitful heritage.

While thus moving with great discernment amid the fac-
tional quarrels of the Protestants, the Baltimores gave
careful thought to peopling their estate with planters and
laborers. In the first advertisement to prospective emi- -
grants, great stress was laid on the climate and soil of the
colony and the possibility of making more than a hundred
per cent profit out of each indentured servant transported;
but as far as the record runs, the religious creeds of the
emigrants were apparently matters of indifference to the
proprietor. At all events, there were both Catholics and
Protestants on the first expedition, though the exact pro-
portion is a matter of controversy. According to a Jesuit
who was on the ground early, the colony was “‘largely”
Catholic; according to the Protestant historian, Henry

Cabot Lodge, “it is a fair presumption that a majority of
the settlers were Protestants.”

_ Whatever the verdict, it is certain that the Baltimores,
if they rendered cautious assistance to priests of their own
faith, showed a willingness to sell or rent land to farmers
of the Protestant creeds, not overlooking thrifty Puritans
in New England. According to an entry in the journal of
Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts, ‘‘Lord Baltimore
being owner of much land near Virginia . . . made tender
of land to any of ours that would transport themselves

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 63

thither, with free liberty of religion and all other privileges
which the place afforded, paying such annual rent as should
be agreed upon.” Though Winthrop added that none of
his people had ‘‘any temptation that way,” as a matter of
fact many Puritans from Massachusetts and many Angli-
cans from Virginia did accept the terms offered to them and
settled on the fertile lands of the Chesapeake shore. Indeed,
they became so numerous in a few years that they threat-
ened to overturn the original polity of the proprietor.
Forgetting their ancient grudges, they made common cause
against his mild tolerance, in their effort to get at his
Catholic and Quaker subjects. If it had not been for the
Toleration Act of 1649, so famous in local history, the
Catholics would have been immediately subdued to Prot-
estant dominion.

This measure of religious indulgence has been the subject
of so much argument and the basis of such large claims in
the name of liberty by both Catholics and Protestants that
its history deserves examination in some detail. The prac-
tice of toleration, which arose from the principles enter-
tained by Lord Baltimore, from his anomalous position
under a Protestant sovereign, and from his eagerness to
sell his land to emigrants, brought into Maryland, as we
have noted, a decided mixture of religious sects, with the
Protestant elements increasing more rapidly than the
Catholic. When Charles I in 1648 was engaged in his
desperate struggle with the Puritan party at home and was
already within the dark shadow of the scaffold, he begged
Lord Baltimore to take measures to avoid the charge that
his colony was in reality a Catholic stronghold. Complying
with this urgent request, Baltimore removed his in
governor and council, appointed Protestant substitutes, and
sent out to his dominion a draft of a bill for limited re-
ligious freedom.

Shortly afterward the great Toleration Act was passed
by the Maryland Assembly. At the time the governor and
council were Protestants. If, as often claimed, the majority

64 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of the lower house was composed of Catholics, the assertion
has been stoutly questioned on the other side. ‘The truth
is that there are no authentic records upon which to settle
the dispute; there are no journals of the legislature showing
how the members voted; and in any case, there is no reason
why any lover of liberty in the abstract should grow excited
over the spectacle. It is exercising restraint to say that a
general freedom of conscience had not been up to that time
a cardinal principle proclaimed by Catholics, Anglicans, or
Puritans wherever they were in a position to coerce.

The terms of the Toleration Act itself reflect the nature
of the liberty cherished by the parties which placed it on
the statute books. It provided that no person professing
to believe in Jesus Christ should be in any way molested
in the exercise of his religion; while it imposed the sentence
of death, accompanied by confiscation of goods, upon any
person who “‘shall deny our Savior Jesus Christ to be the
son of God or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the said Three
Persons of the Trinity, or the Unity of the Godhead, or
- shall use or utter any reproachful speeches, words, or lan-
guage concerning the Holy Trinity or any of the said Three
Persons thereof.”

Other penalties, fines and public whippings, were pre-
scribed for those who spoke reproachfully of the Virgin
Mary or any of the several sects and factions—Puritans,
Presbyterians, Independents, Catholics, Jesuits, Lutherans,
Calvinists, Anabaptists, Brownists, Antinomians, Barrow-
ists, Roundheads, or Separatists. Fines and whippings were
laid down for all who “‘prophane the Sabbath or Lords day
called Sunday by frequent swearing, drunkenness, or by any
uncivil or disorderly recreation or by working on that day
when absolute necessity doth not require.” Such are the
terms of the Act. Such are the circumstances in which it
was passed. Such are the facts in the celebrated case, upon
which those who feel called upon to make righteous judg-
ments may base their verdict.

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 65

One thing is sure. The respite granted by the Toleration
Act was only temporary. In the upheaval that drove
James II from his throne forty years later, the pledge of
indulgence was grievously wounded. From that time for-
ward Anglicans had the upper hand and, making full use
of their opportunity, they established the Church of Eng-
land in Maryland, authorized the collection of taxes for
its support, proscribed the public exercise of Catholic wor-
ship, and forbade the admission of Catholic immigrants.
Thus they exhibited the symbols of Anglican supremacy in
a manner that alienated from the government of England
the affections of a powerful and wealthy class. As George
III learned to his sorrow, Catholics upon occasion could
be as revolutionary as Separatists.

§

The success of the Baltimores, in spite of their tribula-
tions, fired the imagination of other courtiers. When
the long night of the Civil War was over and Charles II
was secure upon the throne of his fathers, there were many
loyal, if not servile, supporters of the old monarchy to be
rewarded and many creditors with claims upon the treasury
and bounty of the new sovereign. Among the throng that
now surged about the throne were eight men of outstanding
pretensions: Clarendon, the prime minister whose devotion
to the royalist cause had been above suspicion; Monk, the
turncoat general of the parliamentary army who had deliv-
ered the country to Charles and was rewarded by elevation
to the peerage; Lord Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of
Shaftesbury, whose facility for changing his opinions in
shifting currents won the favor of his ruler; Sir George
Carteret, who, as governor of the island of Jersey in the
English Channel, had been the last to lower the royal stand-
ard before ellis victorious forces; Sir William Berke-
ley, high Tory governor of Virginia, and his brother, Lord
Berkeley, both of whom had sustained the monarchy against

66 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the popular party; Lord Craven and Sir John Colleton, with
slighter but still considerable claims upon the grace of
Charles II. Upon these favorites as proprietors, Charles
bestowed a great province, known as Carolina, stretching
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, an estate which they were
to rule jointly as pleased their fancies, subject to the laws
of England and with the consent of a local assembly.

A few years after the charter was sealed, Shaftesbury
engaged John Locke, political philosopher and Whig
pamphleteer, to frame a constitution for their imperial
domain. ‘This task the learned bookman discharged by
drafting one of the most fantastic documents now to be
found in the moldering archives of disillusionment. He
proposed that the eldest proprietor should be palatine and
that the others should be admiral, chamberlain, constable,
chief justice, high steward, and treasurer, according to lot.
The proprietors were to reserve one-fifth of the land as
their personal property; another large section was to be
laid out into baronies and manors to be held by an aristocw
racy and tilled by hereditary serfs bound to the soil; and
the remainder was to be sold to freeholders.

In keeping with this economic structure, an elaborate
system of government including a popular assembly was
devised, thus reflecting the Whig ideal of a perfect order >
for the wilderness—an order composed of an aristocracy
resting upon servile labor held in check by a body of yeomen
—the grand purpose being, as Locke said, to avoid '
numerous democracy,” and at the same time to create an
administration ‘‘most agreeable to the monarchy.” This
amusing constitution with a high-sounding title was ratified
by the proprietors and declared in force, but it could no
more be realized in Carolina than in the moon. Its interest
to-day lies in the fact that it reveals the type of society
which the Whigs, the most liberal of the governing classes
in England, would have established in America if they had
not been defeated by the irrepressible and stubborn reaii-
ties of life on the frontier. |

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 67

Without waiting for the philosopher to complete his
scheme, the proprietors raised a fund of £12,000 and fitted
out in 1670 a colonizing expedition which planted a settle-
ment called Charleston, removed to the site of the
present city ten years later. They also offered inducements
to adventurers who would take up land in their concession,
turning a current of migration in that direction. Indeed,
already in the northern portion of their province were rude
settlements made by Quakers who had fled from the rigor-
ous rule of the Established Church in Virginia and by
lawless elements that preferred the freedom of the forests
to the most respectable offerings of the Old Dominion.

Assured religious toleration by proprietors anxious to
sell land, the hunted and discontented from many quarters
now poured into the colony: Dutch angered by English
supremacy in New York, Puritans weary of the clerical
régime, Huguenots fleeing from the dragoons of Louis XIV,
Scotch Presbyterians involved in religious and economic dis-
putes at home or in Ireland, Germans seeking land or
religious liberty or both, and Swiss who found at New Berne
a milder climate and a richer soil than their mountain home
afforded. Under skillful management the cultivation of rice
and indigo was soon introduced, and the basis of economic
prosperity quickly laid, with the aid of a labor supply drawn
from Africa. ‘To protect masters against violence, a drastic
code was adopted prescribing whipping, branding, ear
clipping, castration, and death for various offenses; but the
consolations of the Christian faith were not withheld, for
the law, while denying the right of manumission, expressly
authorized baptism.

It was not long before the proprietors discovered that
they had a stiff-necked generation in their miscellaneous col-
lection of subjects attracted to Carolina from many parts
of the earth. The governors, whom they sent in turn to
the two sections into which the colony was divided—North
and South—were always in conflict with the popular as-
semblies. More than one executive was driven out by the

68 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

irate people from whom he tried to collect quitrents and
other revenues. Again and again, owing to the scarcity of
specie, the legislature of South Carolina insisted on issuing
large quantities of fiat money, thus enacting early scenes
in the controversy between debtors and creditors that was
to rage for more than two centuries as the star of American
empire moved westward. On one occasion local merchants
who protested against paper money were held in jail until
they apologized; and when British merchants across the
sea induced the proprietors to veto the objectionable cur-
rency law, the South Carolina assembly answered by revo-
lution. During the contest, the governor was deposed, a
local paper-money man chosen to rule in the king’s name,
and a protest lodged with the Crown against ‘‘the confused,
negligent, and helpless government of the proprietaries.”

Weary of a fruitless contest that had brought neither
profit nor glory, the owners of the Carolinas sold out to
the Crown in 1729, each of the territories thus becoming
a royal province. With the completion of this sale, the
wrath of the colonists that had once raged around the heads
of governors selected by the proprietors was transferred to
the officers of the king. Freeholders and planters were no
more eager to pay quitrents to the royal treasury than to
eight English landlords; neither were they willing to tol-
erate any extensive interference with their vested interests.
After nearly half a century of conflict over such issues, the
Carolinas were ready for the revolution that put an end
to control by the agents of the Crown.

§

Two of the first Carolina proprietors, Lord Berkeley and
Sir George Carteret, seeing, at the tirne the southern project
was first launched, a promise of fortune in American land
speculation, determined to risk a venture on their own ac-
count; and in 1664 they managed to secure from their inti-
mate friend, the Duke of York, a grant of territory between

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 69

the Hudson and the Delaware to be held on the terms
customary in such cases. Giving to their estate the name
New Jersey, in honor of Carteret’s channel home, the pro-
moters began at once to develop the property by offering
small freeholds to emigrants on easy conditions. When
the doors were thrown open, settlers came from all parts
of the British Isles to join the Dutch who had already built
several hamlets on the west bank of the Hudson. The first
governor, Philip Carteret, brought with him about thirty ad-
venturers and their servants, who established a community
at Elizabeth. Puritans from Connecticut founded the town
of Newark; Scotch-Irish Presbyterians poured into the
eastern counties; and English Quakers sought their peace
and prosperity to the west in the fertile regions of the
Delaware.

Before their enterprise had advanced very far, the pro-
prietors found themselves in hot water, even though they
sought to govern mildly with the aid of a popular assembly.
Some of the Puritan towns, following the custom of Massa-
chusetts, insisted on limiting the local suffrage to church
members and in this matter refused to bow before the
authority of the common legislature. On one thing, how-
ever, they agreed with the Quakers, Presbyterians, and
Dutch, namely, on opposition to paying into the proprietary
chest quitrents for their lands. When the formal collection
began in 1670, all local differences were sunk in a general
resistance to the demands of that treasury. The assembly
ousted the proprietary governor, installed a pretender, and
called for concessions. Sick of the bargain, after haggling
for four years, Berkeley sold his interests to certain Quaker
adventurers; and somewhat later the Carteret portion
passed into other hands too.

But the new proprietors of divided Jersey—East and
West—were equally unhappy in their efforts to govern their
turbulent tenants and at length, weary of ‘‘a very expensive
feather,” they turned the colony over to the Crown in
1702. Thus New Jersey became a royal province, for a

70 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

time united with New York, and royal governors fell heir
to the troubles of the former proprietors as they also tried
to combine administration with the enlargement of their
private estates. Undeterred by the past record of the
colony, Edward Hyde, eldest son of Lord Clarendon,
driven to distraction by his English creditors, secured a
place at the head of the combined provinces and in a re-
markably short time restored his shattered finances. Inci-
dentally he was aided by an astute chief justice, Roger
Mompesson, who had also temporarily ‘“‘stepped abroad to
ease his fortune of some of his father’s debts.’ If the resi-
dents of New Jersey were unable to defeat the designs of
such adepts in administration, they were at least dexterous
enough to block efforts to force upon them the doctrine and
discipline of the Church of England. Even when they were
later given a separate royal governor of their own, they
continued to do battle with the executive over laws and
taxes, and so made their way, with more or less tempest,
down the stream of time to the crisis of the Revolution.

§

The numerous and varied discouragements under which
the Carolina and Jersey proprietors labored did not
frighten a young man of large fortune and discreet address
who also had a substantial claim upon the attentions of
Charles I[I—a young Quaker, William Penn. As a student
at Oxford, Penn had been drawn to the religious life and
with utter devotion had cast in his lot with the despised and
persecuted sect of Friends, then more frequently called
Ranters or Quakers. Neither the harsh régime of the
prison to which he was more than once committed nor the
heavy blows of his irate father could shake his determina-
tion, and after the death of his stern parent in 1670, the
young man, finding himself in possession of considerable
wealth, became interested in America as a religious haven
for his brethren and a place for prudent investment,

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 71

Among the parcels of the estate inherited from his
father, Penn held a claim against Charles II to the amount
of £16,000, then a huge sum. How to extract that debt
from the Merry Monarch long perplexed the young cred-
itor; but finally, aided by the gentle arts of the courtier,
he managed to obtain in payment a large territorial grant
—Pennsylvania, as the king insisted on calling it. In form
the charter effecting this transfer was modeled after that
of Maryland; by express terms Penn was made the true
and absolute lord of his domain and given a wide range
of governmental authority, subject to the advice and con-
sent of the freemen, including the power of making war,
raising troops, and vanquishing his enemies “by God’s as-
sistance.” |

Finding that the territory covered by this royal charter
had no coast line, Penn induced the Duke of York to turn
over to him the Delaware region to the south which had
been wrested from the Swedes by the Dutch and from the
Dutch by the English. Although these lower counties were
assigned to Penn on the same terms as his original grant,
they were transformed into the separate colony of Dela-
ware in 1702 and remained in that status under the Penn
family until the declaration of American independence.

As soon as Penn was in secure possession of his estate,
he set to work as a practical man of affairs to develop his

_ territory—already inhabited by about six thousand people,

Swedes and Dutch on the Delaware and Quakers who had
preceded him in their quest for a refuge. Committed by
his faith to the mild and healing principle of toleration, he
made it known that all who settled in his colony should
enjoy religious liberty. Making the most of this assurance,
he collected a band of followers and at their head set sail
for America in 1682. On his arrival, in conformity with
Quaker pacifism, he made peace with the Indians and paid
them for their claims. His title once cleared to the satis-
faction of his conscience, Penn created a popular assembly,
put into effect a liberal Frame of Government, and laid out

72 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, in a fashion calculated
to obviate the terrible evils of congestion that cursed the
municipalities of the Old World.

Bearing in mind no doubt the methods of Lord Balti-
more, Penn offered land to the large investor in five
thousand acre lots at £100 each, with fifty acres added for
every indentured servant transported, and to every man
who would take over and “‘seat’’ his family in the colony
a five hundred acre holding, all on the basis of an annual
quitrent to the proprietor. If climate, soil, and the diff-
culty of alluring rich settlers had not defeated the plan,
Pennsylvania might have become a colony of great estates
tilled by tenants and laborers but in the end circumstances
made it the home of traders and farmers. Penn’s ingenious
advertising in England. and on the Continent drew mer-
chants, yeomen, and peasants rather than men of wealth
with capital to buy estates—English Quakers, Germans of
various Protestant faiths, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh
Baptists, and later some Irish of the old stock, Catholic in
religion—seekers after homesteads, not potential landlords
of the grand style.

Under the scheme of government established by Penn,
toleration was granted to ‘‘all who confess and acknowledge
one Almighty and eternal God to be the creator, upholder,
and ruler of the world and that hold themselves obliged to
live peaceably and justly in civil society”; while freeholders
and taxpayers professing faith in Jesus Christ were given
the right to vote for members of the popular assembly.
In practice, however, it appears that neither Catholics nor
Jews enjoyed freedom of religious worship, at least in the
beginning of the enterprise. Moreover, ungodly revelers
were subdued to the law and stage plays, cards, dice, May-
games, masques, and excessive hilarity were forbidden. ‘To
make easy the burden of taxes on property an excise for
the support of the government was imposed on spirits.

Though moderation characterized Penn’s theories of
state, his days were filled with “‘hurries and perplexities”’

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE ihe

until the close of his career. His family’s discontent with
life on the raw frontier of America, and his interests in
England forced him to return to his native land, leaving
the administration of his colony in other hands. For some
strange reason he chose governors who had little sympathy
with his settlers; one, a soldier who ruled with military
severity; others, riotous livers who offended his sober and
God-fearing subjects.

As if to fill his cup to the brim, the colonists charged
Penn with enriching himself from the sale of lands and
playing the part of an exacting landlord. Grieved by these
strictures, Penn replied that in truth his outlays had been
greater than his receipts and that his obstreperous settlers
did not pay their quitrents. In fact the dispute became so
bitter that Penn was driven by sheer weariness to consider
selling out to the Crown—only to be greeted by a declara-
tion from the Pennsylvania legislature to the effect that the
very proposition savored “first of fleecing and then of
selling.” Full of sorrows, Penn died in 1718 at the age
of seventy-four.

In the natural course, the proprietorship passed to his
three sons, all of whom loved pleasure and good living
more than the hard work of efficient administration. So
the conflict with the colony went on—dquarrels over paper
money issued by the legislature in spite of proprietary
orders, over attempts of the assembly to tax the property
owned by the Penns, over efforts to collect quitrents from
recalcitrant settlers, over attempts of the belligerent Scotch-
Irish on the frontier to wring from the pacific Quakers
assistance in their constant troubles with the Indians.

It was only by trading and huckstering that the Penns
managed to hold to their property at all and at best they
were playing a losing game. Year by year the party of
disaffection grew steadily. Having gained the upper hand
in the assembly in 1764, it sent Benjamin Franklin to Eng-
land to ask for the abolition of the proprietary system and
the substitution of royal authority. To such a pass had

74 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

things come when the restrictive measures of the mother
country drove the discontented elements of Pennsylvania
to make common cause with the other colonies against all
governments deriving their powers from sources beyond
the sea.

§

The religious motives that figured so largely in the
founding of the English colonies were not especially empha-
sized by the Dutch West India Company when it raised its
flag in the valleys of the Hudson and the Delaware and
announced the creation of New Netherland. There was
no mistake about the purposes of that corporation when it
was established in 1621: its prime object was to earn divi-
dends for its stockholders by trade. It was to carry on
large mercantile operations in the Atlantic basin, prey upon
Spanish commerce, conquer Brazil, carry slaves to American
plantations, reap profits from traffic in furs, and establish
settlements. Two years after its charter was duly drawn,
the Company took steps looking toward the occupation of
the Hudson Valley. Within a short time it built trading
posts at Fort Orange, the present site of Albany, and on
the Island of Manhattan, purchased from the Indians for
sixty guilders, or about twenty-four dollars.

Having obtained two strategic military centers, the Com-
pany undertook to develop its estate into a paying property.
Appreciating the importance of a freehold peasantry, it
offered land in small lots to freemen who would go with
their families to the new settlements. By this process it
started a tiny trickle of immigrants into the colony, Wal-
loons, or Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands, min-
gling with sturdy Dutch farmers in laying out homesteads
or boweries at favorable points on Long Island and on
both sides of the Hudson.

Finding this a slow operation, the corporation in 1629
offered to grant a huge domain to every patroon who
would transport fifty persons at least fifteen years old and

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 75

establish them on the land as laborers bound by servile
tenure. In this manner a number of great feudal families
was created—some of them so powerful that they survived
the storms of factions, wars, and revolutions until near the
middle of the nineteenth century. Not yet content with the
growth of local industry, the Company, as a regular part
of its business, imported slaves from Africa to work in
field, shop, and kitchen.

Nevertheless, in spite of these efforts, New Netherland,
at the end of forty years, had only about ten thousand in-
habitants, of whom approximately one-sixth dwelt in the
thriving village of New Amsterdam on the southern end
of Manhattan Island. ‘The truth is that the Company
found the fur trade with the Indians the most lucrative
division of its enterprise; its agents and interlopers ex-
changed rum and firearms on favorable terms for choice
peltries, thus sowing dragons’ teeth while earning high
dividends. Of all the sickening butcheries that accompanied
the conflict of whites and Indians, there was nothing more
horrible than the tragedies which occurred on the frontiers
of New Netherland.

Still it must not be thought that the Dutch were entirely
indifferent to spiritual affairs. On the contrary, their Re-
formed Church was established in the colony; and the
governors sent out by the Company, though usually hard-
fisted men of affairs, gave no little attention to providing
the inhabitants with ministers, teachers, and ‘‘comforters
of the sick.” ‘Their papers were not as full of references
to divine interposition as those of English colonial execu-
tives, but the doughty old Stuyvesant, on one occasion when
very angry at complaints against his rule, referred to God
as well as the Dutch West India Company as a source of
his authority. Nor were the Dutch entirely indifferent to
the spiritual condition of the Indians. Missionaries were
sent to the heathen and heroic efforts brought some of the
Mohawks to the Christian faith. ‘The harvest, however,
was not great and in spite of their efforts, a Frenchman

76 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

flung at the Dutch the charge that they were lacking in the
“constant and laborious zeal for the salvation of unbe-
lievers, the most obvious and distinguishing mark of the
true Church of Christ.”

From the beginning, the fortunes of the Dutch colony
of New Netherland were in jeopardy. ‘The territory on
which it was planted was claimed by the English on grounds
of prior discovery. On its eastern frontier it was early
threatened by advancing pioneers in Connecticut, who of-
fered a direct menace to the farmers and traders of the
Hudson Valley. Even the Pilgrims far away at Plymouth,
while they remembered the kind treatment they received in
Holland, grumbled about the trading cruises of the Dutch
along the coast and the transfer of business in peltries to the
market at New Amsterdam. Besides this, the English at
home, already imperial rivals of the Dutch in two hemi-
spheres, were in a mood to put a term to their competition
in the New World at least.

In 1664 the blow fell. King Charles II granted to his
brother, the Duke of York, the whole region between the
Hudson and the Delaware and, without giving the Dutch
any warning, an English fleet descended upon New Amster-
dam with a thundering command to surrender. In vain did
the testy old governor, Peter Stuyvesant, storm and protest.
New Netherland passed under the English flag.

The Duke of York, now in possession of his goodly
domain, after assigning a part of it, as we have seen, to
Carteret and Berkeley for their colony of New Jersey,
gave his name to the rest and ruled it as high proprietor
until he ascended the throne in 1685. Fort Orange became
Albany; New Amsterdam became New York; and English
homesteads began to rise among the Dutch boweries.
Under the genial favor of the Duke, English fortune hunt-
ers now secured huge grants, running in size from fifty
thousand to a million acres, at negligible quitrents, thus
adding an English aristocracy, partly absentee, to the Dutch
gentry created by the West India Company and retarding

LAYING THE STRUCTURAL BASE 77

the growth of the colony by impediments in the way of
freeholders. What was lost, however, in the slow develop-
ment of agriculture was made up in part by an increase of
trade. So in a fashion the society of England was dupli-
cated. Sons of the landed proprietors went in for trade
as well as the Church and the army; daughters of rich
merchants married sons of landed families; and after New
York became a royal province on the coronation of James,
in 1685, a little flavor of the court gave tone to the cere-
monial life of the upper classes.

§

Among the colonies developed as economic undertakings
and religious havens by corporations and proprietors, it
is rather difficult to place Georgia, the last of the English
settlements in America. It did not spring from the enter-
prise of a commercial company, the ambitions of a rich
adventurer, or the aspirations of seekers after religious
liberty. It had its origin in the dream of a philan-
thropist, James Oglethorpe. ‘That gallant soldier was long
oppressed in spirit by the horrible plight of poor wretches
languishing in English prisons—often merely unlucky
debtors, sometimes unhappy persons unable to accept the
prevailing styles in religion, or again the victims of one of
the sternest criminal codes to be found in the annals of
man’s inhumanity.

After pondering long upon the problem thus presented,
Oglethorpe came to the conclusion that the solution lay in
another American colony. Acting largely on his motion,
George II in 1732 vested in the hands of a board of trus-
tees a large dominion below South Carolina, charging them
to administer their estate ‘‘as one body politic and cor-
porate.” At Savannah, during the next year, Oglethorpe
made the first settlement in the new colony.

In this undertaking, business and philanthropy were to be
combined. Lands were to be granted to emigrants in smali

78 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lots, none more than five hundred acres in size, and wine and
silk were to be produced as staples. To all except Catho-
lics the doors were to be open and the Indians were to be
converted to Christianity. Slavery was forbidden because
the trustees did not want to create a province “‘void of
white inhabitants, filled with blacks, the precarious property
of a few.’ The sale of rum was prohibited in the interest
of industry and good order.

In these circumstances Georgia soon attracted a polyglot
population, including Jews from many parts of Europe,
Salzburgers from the valleys of the eastern Alps, Moravi-
ans led by Count Zinzendorf, Highlanders under John
McLeod of Skye, as well as Englishmen of all sorts and
conditions. Missionaries came to nourish the spiritual life
of the colony: John and Charles Wesley for a time toiled
in that curious vineyard; Whitefield and Habersham
stormed the sinners with prayers and sermons.

In view of all this diversity, it is not surprising that
Georgia early became the scene of domestic strife. Charles
Wesley quarreled with Oglethorpe and was sent home,
ostensibly as the bearer of dispatches. John Wesley, after
betraying a strange indiscretion in an affair of the heart.
‘shook the dust of Georgia off his feet” in time to escape
the consequences of a suit filed by the husband of the lady
in the case. The rank and file of colonists also made
trouble for the administration by demanding rum and slaves
and then more liberty in disposing of their lands.

On the point of rum, the trustees finally had to yield at
the end of ten years. In a short time the pressure for
slavery also became irresistible. Both Whitefield and
Habersham made powerful pleas in favor of the institution
on the ground that it would advance the propaganda of the
gospel of Jesus. ‘Many of the poor slaves in America,”
exclaimed the latter, “have already been made freemen of
the heavenly Jerusalem.” Seeking advice from their
spiritual guides in Germany, the Salzburgers were gratified
to hear that “if you take slaves in faith and with the intent

LAYING |THE STRUCTURAL BASE 79

of conducting them to Christ, the action will not be sin,
but may prove a benediction.” Thus encouraged by min-
isters of the gospel, the merchants of Savannah cried out
for ‘“‘the one thing needful.”’ So the harassed trustees
were driven to give their consent, adding slaves to the
already mixed population of Georgia.

As a result the lowlands of the colony were laid out
into plantations tilled by slaves on their way to the status
of freemen in “the heavenly Jerusalem,” while the yeomen
were driven steadily into the piedmont, giving a sectional
flavor to the economics and politics of Georgia that lasted
until the age of populism and beyond. When rum and
slaves were introduced, the anxieties of the trustees in-
creased rather than diminished until, exhausted by weari-
some battles with the local assembly, the corporation gave
up the ghost in 1752 and Georgia, like the neighboring
Carolinas, became a royal province.

CHAPTER III

The Growth of Economic and Political Power
() NE hundred and seventy years lay between the found-

ing of Jamestown and the Declaration of. Independ-

ence—a longer period, it is instructive to remem-
ber, than the lapse of time since America took her place
among the sovereign nations of the earth. To the casual
reader of letters, diaries, journals, and other records of the
age, those colonial years seem mainly filled with the swirling
eddies of purposeless war and politics. There were countless
clashes with the Indians, always brutal, often futile. There
were wars with the French and Spanish, agonizing phases of
the English struggle for the encirclement of the globe that
incarnadined the waters of seven seas and the soil of five
continents.

There were domestic events that crowded the pages of
those who chronicled the passing days: exciting contests in
America as the fortunes of contending parties in England
flowed and ebbed through revolution, restoration, and revo-
lution; quarrels among the colonies and proprietors over
boundaries and commercial regulations; theological dis-

80

THE GROWTH OF POWER 81

putes, loud and long, as Cotton Mather and Jonathan
Edwards lashed sinners or parsons of the Church of Eng-
land sought to extend their authority over all the king’s
subjects; flashes of intolerance flaming out against Catho-
lics, Jews, and the holders of novel ideas; dramatic strug-
gles over freedom of the press whenever royal agents laid
heavy hands on the engines of public opinion; angry con-
troversies between governors and popular assemblies ending
sometimes in the expulsion of the king’s officers; epidemics
of smallpox sending terror through widespread communi-
ties; plagues of popular frenzy such as the execution of
witches in New England and massacres of Negroes in New
York; patient experiments in agricultural improvements;
and the ceaseless pageant of common humanity engrossed
in the routine of labor from sun to sun.

And yet from our vantage point we can now see, beneath
the apparently driftless whirl of events, deep currents
setting in toward independence. Crashing axes and crack-
ing rifles on the Western frontier marked the inexorable
advance of the American empire. The ceaseless coming and
going of ships meant more hands to labor and more wealth
for private chests. Stern old gentlemen, in ruffles and knee
breeches, bending over their accounts, were swelling the
patrimonies that were to give leisure and power to the
Gadsdens, Pinckneys, Morrises, Washingtons, Jeffersons,
and Adamses of the American Revolution. Quarrels in
colonial assemblies were teaching sons of yeomen and mer-
chants how to draw resolutions, frame declarations, manage
finances, make constitutions, and carry on the warfare of
the public forum.

In meeting houses, clerical studies, college classrooms,
and petty editorial chambers, active minds were gathering
the knowledge with which to freight their arguments and
give point to their appeals directed to a somnolent, yet
potential, nation unfolding into sovereignty. Campaigns
against the Indians and the French showed provincials how
to organize, supply, and direct that indispensable branch of

82 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the state—military force. Colonial privateers, preying on

French and Spanish commerce, were learning how to trim
their sails and use their guns preparatory to the contest
with English seamen. In short, America was acquiring
during those colonial years the economic resources, political
experience, intellectual acumen, and military arts that were
to sweep half a continent into independence and summon
into being a governing class capable of sustaining it.

§

In the early stages of colonial development, the stream

of migration to America was almost purely English—mer-
chants, yeomen, laborers, artisans, scholars from Oxford
and Cambridge, and a few, a very few, scions of noble
families usually in quest of materials with which to repair
damaged fortunes. ‘This movement was strongest in the
century that saw the foundation of the colonies. The Puri-
tan exodus that carried about twenty thousand adventurers
to New England was especially large during the years
between 1629 and 1640 while Charles I was endeavoring to
establish a personal despotism in London; then it dwindled
to a thin stream.
_. Thus it happened that, on the eve of the Revolution,
the major portion of the inhabitants in that region were
the descendants of original pioneer stock. For different
reasons, perhaps, but with similar results the English migra-
tion into the Southern colonies also slowed down, after the
first spurt of enthusiasm, leaving the older houses in pos-
session of the ancestral heritage.

During the eighteenth century the growth of the English
population in America was due to big families among the
settlers rather than to increments from the mother country.
An abundance of cheap land encouraged early marriages,
making a wife and children economic assets, not a drain
upon the husbandman’s purse. As the records of family
Bibles bore witness, the ancient injunction to replenish the

THE GROWTH OF POWER 83

earth was literally fulfilled. Maria Hazard, for example,
born in Rhode Island, lived to the ripe old age of a hundred
years, and ‘“‘could count five hundred children, grandchil-
dren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
When she died, two hundred and five of them were alive;
a grand-daughter of hers had already been a grandmother
near fifteen years.” Through the fecundity of such fami-
lies the colonies were in time dominated by generations
reared on American soil, who knew not England and whose
affections were fixed upon this country as their native land.

With few exceptions, the leaders of the nation that waged~

the war of independence were of the oldest stock. ‘The
founder of the Adams family landed in Massachusetts
about 1636; the first Washington came to the shores of
Virginia in 1656; the original Franklin took up his humble
labors on this continent in 1685.

Later additions to the colonial population were, in the
main, from peoples who were either hostile to the admin-
istration at London or who at least felt no thrill of patriot-
ism when they saw the flag of England waving above their

heads. The Scotch-Irish, next in numbers to the English, ~

had, like the Puritans, fled from the regimen of the gov-
ernment of Great Britain. Their ancestors, in the seven-
teenth century, had moved from Scotland to the north of
Ireland—a fertile region vacated by the natives as they
were scourged and driven before the sword and torch of
Cromwell. There the Scotch kept alive their Presbyterian
faith and grew prosperous on the manufacture of linen
and woolen cloth until their industry and their religion
brought them also into conflict with the authorities of
England. On complaints arising from English competition,
Parliament forbade the export of their cloth and, in the
acts intended to establish the supremacy of the Anglican

Church, laid their worship too under the ban. It was:

in despair of relief from oppression in Ireland that they
then turned to America as a refuge.
About the end of the seventeenth century, a tide of

rm

84 THE RISE OF AMERICAN .CIVILIZATION

Scotch-Irish migration, augmented by individuals and whole
communities direct from Scotland, set in strongly toward
the New World and continued unbroken for generations.
Finding the coastal region in the possession of the earlier
arrivals—English, Dutch, and Swedes—the Scotch were
usually forced to the frontier, where their remoteness, their
conditions of life and their tense struggle for existence made
still weaker the ties that bound them to the Old World.
Even less than the Puritans of New England did they have
reason to profess loyalty to King George and their num-
ber, embracing about one-sixth of the colonial population,
made them formidable.

Like the Scotch-Irish immigrants, the Germans, except
for a few scattered adventurers, appeared late upon the
American scene; not until William Penn opened wide the
doors of his colony in the latter part of the seventeenth
century did they migrate in large numbers. Most of the

“Germans were also forced into the interior, where they

maintained their separate language, press, religion, and
schools, manifesting a serene indifference to all efforts to
Anglicize them. If they felt no active hostility toward
London, they had no special reason for taking the side of
George III against their neighbors and they were not to
be ignored for in 1776 they numbered at least two hundred
thousand.

The French Huguenots were other late immigrants;
the seventeenth century was drawing to a close when Louis
XIV revoked their charter of toleration—the Edict of
Nantes—and harried them from his land. Having fol-
lowed commercial pursuits principally at home, most of the
Huguenots continued in those vocations on their arrival
in the New World. As merchants they were keenly alive
to the competition of Englishmen in the American markets.
As people of substance and education alien to English tradi-
tions, they furnished more than their share of political lead-
ership in the movement that overthrew British dominion.

Perhaps equally numerous in America were the native

THE GROWTH OF POWER 85

Irish, Celtic in race and Catholic in religion, who seem to
have come by the hundreds, if not by the thousands, bearing
the scars of an age-long conflict with the Anglo-Saxon.
Though they met no very cordial reception in the land of
their adoption, they flocked to the American army when-
its standard of revolt was raised. From many lands came
the Jews fleeing as of old from economic and religious’
persecution; like the Huguenots, they turned to merchan-
dising and in a similar fashion were subjected to the pres-
sure of English competition. Thus it happened that, in
the peopling of the colonies, the stream of tendency ran
against the continuance of political allegiance to the Old
World, its powers, governors, and potentates.

Meanwhile intercolonial migrations were breaking down |
the barriers of purely local circumstance. Puritans, scarcely
established in Connecticut, pulled up their roots, moved
into Long Island, and then made their way into New
Jersey. Quakers from Plymouth, pained by conflicts with
their neighbors, passed into Virginia and, meeting little
friendliness there, eventually found a home in the western
wilderness of North Carolina. A French Huguenot,
Faneuil, tried his fortune in New York, transferred his
business to Rhode Island, sent his son, Peter, to Boston.
In the veins of many colonists of the second generation
ran the blood of two or three nations and an English name
might well cover a Dutchman, a Swede, or a Scotch cove-
nanter. For instance, Dirck Stoffels Langesstraet sailed
from the Netherlands to the New World in 1657; a de-
scendant married a Quakeress in New Jersey; the good old
Dutch name became Longstreet; restless offspring took ship
for Georgia; finally James Longstreet, trained at West
Point, on the river once claimed by Holland, served the
Southern Confederacy from Manassas to Appomattox.
Benjamin Franklin, nourished in Boston, ripened his talents
in the milder atmosphere of Philadelphia, and gave his
last years to the service of a continent. It is true that
the cross-currents of the population movement were not

86 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

heavy but the migrations were already mixing many strains,
making a new amalgam, known as American.

§

When once a foothold was secured on the coast line,
the American colonists with tireless activity carried their
enterprise in every direction as they were beckoned by fer-
tile valleys, gaps in somber mountains, and the broad ways
of the open sea. Having few mechanical contrivances, their /
course was largely shaped by the geographical environment
in which they found themselves. ‘They followed the roads
which nature had laid out. From the seaboard they swept
westward into the interior with incredible swiftness in spite
of hostile Indian tribes and the vanguard of French im-
perialism. Fur traders and hunters were on the outer
fringe of the combers that rolled onward toward the
setting sun; not far behind were men of practical interest
lured by curiosity and love of adventure. Then came the
land-hungry farmers. On every part of the long line the
push continued day and night.

To the north, Puritan pioneers pressed steadily inland
until, within less than a century after the founding of Bos-
ton, they had their outposts in the Housatonic Valley, on
the very edge of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the
neighboring colony of New York the advance on the hinter-
land was directed mainly up the Hudson River to Albany,
the old Dutch center, from which spreading farms soon
radiated toward every point of the compass. New Jer-
sey, lying between two prosperous commercial settlements,
was quickly filled by migrations from both directions as
well as from the Old World; the beginnings of New Bruns-
wick were made in 1681 and of Trenton four years later.
For the northward thrust into Pennsylvania the Susque-
hanna River opened a highway; by 1726 farms were laid
out on the present site of Harrisburg; while along the south-
ern frontier a thin line of settlements steadily crept toward

THE GROWTH OF POWER 87

the upper waters of the Ohio, reaching the gateway to the
Mississippi Valley, before the colony passed from the con:
trol of the Penn family.

In the South, the westward march was even swifter.
Under the system of extensive and wasteful cultivation by
slave labor, the rich coastal plain was quickly occupied,
forcing small farmers in search of homes to flock into the
upland regions. As soon as settlements were well started
in the piedmont, they were fed by streams of migration
from the German and Scotch-Irish regions of Pennsylvania.
By this process of unremitting penetration, the Blue Ridge
country and the Shenandoah Valley were occupied while the
English flag still floated over the frontier posts. Even the
higher mountain barriers were pierced; as early as 1654 a
Virginia colonel was in the Kentucky country, and within
forty years traficking was begun with the Cherokees in the
forests of Tennessee.

On the eve of the American Revolution, explorers were
zealously searching that segment of the frontier in every
nook and cranny—state builders at work. In 1751, Christo-
pher Gist was paddling his canoe on the waters of the
Kentucky River; a few years later John Finley was tramp-
ing over ground that was soon to be dark and bloody. In
1769, that fearless Nimrod, Danie! Boone, “ordained of
God to settle the wilderness,” led a band through the Cum-
berland Gap into the new promised land. Following in
the trail of the forerunners went groups of pioneer farmers.

Inspired by their reports, a North Carolina promoter,
Richard Henderson, dreaming of profits to be made in
western land, organized a company, purchased from the
Indians in 1775 an immense domain lying between the
Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers, and founded the settle-
ment of Transylvania. Thus, before Washington took com-
mand of the revolutionary army at Cambridge a fourteenth
English colony was in process of formation far beyond

the seaboard line. Speaking of America as a whole, a fer- _

tile domain many times the area of England was already

88 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

staked out, sparsely settled, and brought under rude but
productive cultivation. Facts, as Carlyle would say, im-
mense and indubitable!

This inland advance of colonial empire accelerated the
tendency toward the predominance of the freehold farmer
in the agricultural economy of America. It was the man
fired by the passion for owning a plot of ground who led
the vanguard of settlers all along the frontier from New
Hampshire to Georgia; to him cheap land meant freedom,
to his family a rude but sufficient comfort. So the English,
German, and Scotch-Irish pioneers who crept out into the
narrow valleys, out into the deep forests, and high into
the piedmont carried with them the freehold system and
the social order inevitably associated with it. “They were
not peasants, in the European sense of the word, surrounded
by agricultural resources already exploited and encircled
by ruling orders of landlords and clergy armed with engines
of state and church for subduing laborers to social discipline.
On the contrary, these marching pioneers were confronted
by land teeming with original fertility, by forests and
streams alive with game and fish, and they were, under the
sun and stars, their own masters.

In these circumstances a new psychology was evoked,
making a race of men and women utterly different in spirit
from those who dwelt on the great manors of New York
and Maryland, on the wide Southern plantations, and in
the villages of the Old World. Moreover, these free-
hold farmers faced the New West, not Europe; their com-
munities were more isolated, more provincial, more inde-
pendent, more American than those along the Atlantic
seaboard. Passing years but strengthened their fiber and
their love of liberty, while the ties of memory and affection
that bound them to the Old World faded into oblivion.

Inexorably the currents of their life and thought ran in
new channels. They would not have been at home in the
goodly gatherings of Doctor Johnson’s Grub Street friends,
nor could they have deported themselves correctly with

THE GROWTH OF POWER 89

gentlemen in court dress or lawn sleeves jostling for favor,
preferment, and place at a levee of George III. Nothing
in their lives made them a part of the system of privilege
and class rule that constituted the government of England
in the eighteenth century. Nothing in their lives inclined
them to look with friendly eyes upon the emissaries of that
system—neither the English fur traders who resented every
invasion of farmers into the haunts of game nor the English
land speculators, often the favorites of royal governors,
ever studying colonial maps for magnificent grants with
which to enrich themselves and their families. The bonds
that united the people of the interior to the English govern-
ment were as light as gossamer and, when fear of the
French and Spanish had been dissipated by war, they were
shaken off like dew after the first crack of the rifle at
Concord.

From the huge agricultural area already occupied in 1765

flowed annually an immense stream of produce. All the

sections save New England raised more provisions than
they could consume. The middle colonies sent to the port
towns for shipment mountains of corn, flour, salt pork, flax,
hemp, furs, and peas, as well as livestock, lumber, shingles,
barrel staves, and houses all shaped for immediate erection.
Maryland and Virginia furnished the great staple, tobacco,
the mainstay of their economic life—an article for which
the planters had a steady demand unhampered by com-
petition. It was in tobacco that they paid for imported
cloth, tea, coffee, furniture, silver, carpets, and tapestries,
and met the bills of their sons studying in Oxford or in
Cambridge. Since the crop was sure, those who produced
it could easily obtain advances in goods and cash, so easily
in fact that from year to year their credits mounted higher
and higher until, by the eve of the Revolution, Southern
gentlemen were owing English merchants thousands of
pounds, the payment of which they were not unhappy to
see stayed by the struggle for independence and finally dis-
charged in large part by the government of the United

90 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

States under the benign administration of one of their
brethren, Thomas Jefferson. North Carolina offered farm
produce and some tobacco in the market, but paid its Lon-
don bills mainly in tar, pitch, and turpentine. South Caro-
lina and Georgia furnished rice, shingles, bacon, and salt
beef to the Atlantic and Mediterranean trade, and about
the middle of the eighteenth century, after persistent experi-
ments led by Eliza Pinckney, added indigo to their -profit-
able staples.
§

On the ocean as on the land, American colonists drove
their enterprise until they became no mean competitors of
those hardy mariners who bore the British flag around the
world and into the markets of every known port. The
inhospitable soil of New England early directed the industry
of the Puritans to the sea, to fishing, shipping, trading, and
all the varied interests connected with such undertakings.
Local forests furnished oak for timbers and boards, fir for
masts, pitch for turpentine and tar; fields yielded hemp for
rope; and mines iron for anchors and chains. Why should
man be a serf of the soil when he could ride the bounding
main? All along the northern coast, especially the New
England line, were busy shipyards where, to the music
of hammer and saw, rose splendid sloops and schooners—
swift and beautiful—big enough to sail any sea and sturdy
enough to weather any gale. By the middle of the eight-
eenth century, New England was launching seventy new
ships every year, New York and Pennsylvania forty-five,
and the states to the south forty. Already London ship-
~builders beside the Thames had begun to complain that
their trade was declining, their workmen migrating, their
profits disappearing as a result of American competition.

It was the sea that offered the highest adventure to the
youth of the colonial period. New England boys in their
early years fled from the stony fields, picked up the art of
navigation, saved a little money, and at the age of nineteen

THE GROWTH OF POWER 91

or twenty commanded brigs of their own. The sea per-
mitted them to escape from the terrible sermons of the
Mathers, to make a fortune, to rise to a social position,
and to wear with dignity the title of gentleman. Sea breezes
carried them into distant lands where they saw strange
peoples and stranger customs which slowly dissolved in
skepticism the faith and usages of their fathers.

When piping times of peace were broken, as often hap-
pened, by wars between England and other imperial powers,
the losses of regular trade were more than offset by
privateering at the expense of the French or Dutch or
Spaniards. As soon as a storm burst, the government issued
licenses to private shipowners authorizing them to seize the
vessels and goods of the enemy wherever found on the
high seas. Daring captains, who shared the loot with their
sailors, were financed by local merchant princes and let
loose in shoals upon the foe. In the journals left by such
freebooters, operating under the color of the law with seal
and parchment in their cabins, may be read many a tale
of exciting adventure. ‘Brave living with our people,”
wrote one of them, Captain Benjamin Norton, who sailed
for the West Indies in 1741 to singe the Spaniard’s beard.
‘Punch every day, which makes them dream strange things
which foretells Great Success in our Cruize. They dream
of nothing but mad Bulls, Spaniards and bagg of Gold.”

From privateering it was easy to turn to piracy. Thus
did the doughty Captain Sawkins, who, with a hardy crew,
harried the Panama coasts. When a local Spanish gov-
ernor asked to see their commission, the Captain replied
that they brought “‘commissions on the muzzles of our guns,
at which time he should read them as plain as the flame
of gunpowder could make them.” Yet Captain Sawkins
was not a godless man; finding his pirate crew shaking dice
on a Sunday, he threw the shining ivories overboard to
express his deep indignation at such profanation of that
holy day.

Others equally courageous were more consistently pagan

92 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

in their view of life. Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for
instance, wearing a “rich crimson Damask Wastcoate, and
Breeches, a red Feather in his Hat, and a Gold Chain ten
times around his Neck,” scorned the polite practices of
pulpit, pew, and counting house. His mighty men vowed
that they would never be captured and hanged like Captain
Kidd’s crew, but would rather “‘put fire with one of their
Pistols to their Powder and go all merrily to Hell to-
gether.’’ Perhaps they were screwed up to that high
resolve by the knowledge that, when imprisoned pirates
were being prepared for the gallows, ‘Sermons were
preached in their hearing every day . . . And nothing was
left that could be done for their Good.”

Ships built by American labor were, of course, mainly
employed in the profitable undertakings of peaceful trade.
In waters within reach was an abundant supply of whales,
cod, salmon, mackerel, and other kinds of fish, which af-
forded the material for an immense and growing business—
catching, curing, and shipping. On this basis rested an im-
portant branch of American economy, next in importance,
perhaps, to tobacco planting and absolutely essential to the
prosperity of the colonies. The best fish were carried to
England, Spain, and Italy and the proceeds principally used
to pay for manufactures bought of the mother country.
Inferior grades were shipped to the West Indies to serve
as food for slaves and were there exchanged for sugar and
molasses, which were in turn transformed into rum.

In its extent and daring the whaling industry especially
aroused the admiration of the Old World. Burke, warning
his colleagues in Parliament against treating the Americans
as puny children, bade them ‘‘look at the manner in which
the people of New England have of late carried on the
whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling
mountains of ice and behold them penetrating into the
deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s
Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic
circle, we hear that they have pierced the opposite region

THE GROWTH OF POWER 93

of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged
under the frozen serpent of the South. . . . Nor is the
equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accu-
mulated winter of both poles. We know that whilst some
of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast
of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic
game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed »
by their fisheries. No climate that is not a witness to their
toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activ-
ity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English
enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hard
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this
recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the
gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”

Out of the oil and candles yielded by this dangerous pur-
suit flowed a huge business with the mother country and
Europe. Under the glow of oil lamps, the cottages of New
England farmers were transformed at night from dingy
hovels into well-lighted homes where books could be read
and games played after the long day’s work was done— |
a novel and appealing scene in the history of agriculture,
the beginning of a revolution in culture.

Among the filiated industries of the sea was a formidable
trafic in rum which touched many shores and sustained
many thriving towns. The sugar and molasses of the West
Indies were carried to New England, especially to Rhode
Island, where they were transformed by distilleries into a
spirit with the qualities of liquid fire. This beverage was
then sold in enormous quantities to the fishermen engaged
with net and harpoon in biting winds and chilling spray, to
stalwart laborers in the dockyards, and to masters of sailing
ships, who never failed on the appointed hour to serve grog
as named in the bond.

Larger quantities of rum went into the slave trade. It
was the staple article in that branch of business enterprise;
it passed as currency on the West coast of Africa, where
Negroes, to slake their fierce appetite, would sell their

94 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

enemies, their friends, their mothers, fathers, wives, daugh-
ters, and sons for New England’s scalding potion. The
unhappy victims of this traffic, huddled in the low spaces
made vacant by the removal of hogsheads, were taken to the
West Indies to raise more sugar or to the plantations of
the Southern colonies to toil in the rice and tobacco fields.

From the profits of this exchange came the fortunes of
great families and the prosperity of whole communities.
When, therefore, the English government sought to favor
the plantations of the English West Indies at the expense
of the neighboring islands belonging to France, by taxing
the sugar of the latter, the action struck deep into the
interests of New England manufacturers as well as the
business of carriers whose sails were spread under many
skies.

Next in importance to the fisheries and the various
branches of enterprise connected with them was the general
carrying trade, which employed thousands of American
ships. First of all, in this relation, was the coastwise trafhic
—in itself enormous. Since the roads uniting the colo-
nies were few in number and well-nigh impassable for stage-
coaches or wagons during a large part of the year, the sea
and the rivers had to furnish a substitute. Hence, a regular
freight and passenger service sprang up along the shore,
permitting the merchants of Boston, Baltimore, Charleston,
or New York to set sail for a distant American port almost
_ any day in the week.

Another branch of the sea trade was the transport of
the produce of farms and plantations to the West Indies
and to Europe and the carriage of manufactures home on
the return voyage. Asan old writer remarked, the Yankees
gave “unremitting attention to the most minute article
which could be made to yield a profit” and ‘obtained for
themselves the appellation of the Dutchmen of America.”
Did the burghers of Holland want sugar for their tea?
Americans brought it swiftly from the West Indies and
sold it for a bill of exchange on London. Did Spanish

THE GROWTH OF POWER 95

grandees demand choice flour from New York or Penn-
sylvania? American shipmasters soon had their prows
pointed toward the nearest port of Spain with such cargoes
to be exchanged for precious specie or for old wine to en-
liven good dinners in Boston, Charleston, or Philadelphia.
There was no considerable port of the great Atlantic basin
or the Mediterranean that did not regularly witness the
coming and going of American ship captains seeking to
turn an “honest penny’ by trade, sometimes with only
poetic respect for the local revenue laws.

§

Less romantic than the lure of the sea, but no less potent
in the upbuilding of economic strength, was the development
of industries in the colonies. Having at hand all the ma-
terials and natural resources for manufacturing, the Ameri-
cans through necessity and enterprise supplemented their ~
labors at the bake-oven and the plow with the handicrafts of
loom and forge. From the very beginning, the women of
nearly every home spun and wove and sewed, supplying
serges, linsey-woolseys, and other coarse woolen fabrics
for rough wear. As time went on their skill increased until
they were able to make broadcloth which gentlemen of
fastidious taste could wear without shame at the church
or in the counting house.

Seeing the germs of a lucrative business in this domestic

craft, men also gave their attention to it, building little
iiilah ere and there along the tumbling streams and placing ~
upon machinery some of the burdens of labor. Under this
double stimulus, production for the use of the family
widened into production for the community, and at length
for a lively export trade to the plantations of the South and
the West Indies. By the opening years of the eighteenth
century the trafic had become so large that the royal gov-
ernor in New York grew alarmed at the menace of the

competition in textiles; with great foresight he warned the

96 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

authorities in London that people who could clothe them-
selves handsomely without the help of England would soon
begin to think of ruling themselves without her supervision.
Economically not so important but artistically not a whit
behind the woolen industry was the manufacture of fine
linens by thrifty housewives; the samples of their work that
have come down to us bear witness to their prowess at the
wheel and loom.

Into other industrial fields, the enterprising colonials also
ventured with signal success. At shops scattered far and
wide, hats of no mean style and finish were turned out for
local trade and even for export to distant settlements.
Skillful weavers at Germantown supplied thread stock-
ings by the thousand dozen at a dollar a pair. Saffron
books of colonial merchants tell us of rope, starch, candles,
earthenware, leather goods, shirtings, sheeting, duck, glass,
refined sugar, and paper made by American labor in in-
creasing quantities, pressing hard upon English imports in
many markets and giving promise of indefinite expansion
under favorable conditions.

Also in the iron industry—that very basis of modern
imperial power—did American enterprise show signs of
future greatness. In almost every colony beds of ore were
discovered and, as soon as the first days of settlement were
over, forges appeared along the rivers of New England,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The ways of the
ironmakers can be illustrated in the progress of Abraham
Lincoln’s forebears. The third son of the first Lincoln,
who came to Massachusetts in 1637, built a forge on the
banks of a neighboring brook and prospered; other descend-
ants carried that industry into New Jersey; and a hundred
years later Lincolns were engaged in ‘Tubal Cain’s art on
the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania. With individual initiative,
corporate enterprise was combined: a mining company was
organized at Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1709.

Whether working for companies or on their own account,
most of the masters were content to turn out bar iron for

THE GROWTH OF POWER 97

local use, or pig iron for transport to the mills of England;
but the more adventurous leaders, especially in the North-
ern colonies, were not so modest in their ambitions. They
set up rolling and slitting mills; they manufactured nails,
guns, chains, kettles, hardware, hinges, hoes, spades, and
all the coarser articles that could be made of metal. The
product of many a colonial foundry survives in the chimneys
of Georgian houses and in the museums recently erected
by reverent hands.
§

Though, to the statistician of modern trade, the industry
of colonial America seems trivial, yet in comparison with
the enterprise of England at the time it assumed serious
proportions. At all events—and this is the point—in
every branch it excited the fears and Jealousies of English
competitors. Even with the seven seas to command there
was hot rivalry in fishing, so hot that, in 1775, an English
writer exclaimed: ‘“The Northern colonies have nearly
beaten us out of the Newfoundland fisheries, that great
nursery of seamen; insomuch that the share of New Eng-
land alone exceeds that of Britain.’ Shipbuilders of the
Thames, as we have said, protested that the American yards
carried off their business, their workmen, and their profits.

Bursting out in anger over the growth of colonial carry-
ing enterprises, a contemporary English observer com-
plained bitterly that ‘‘the trading part of the colonies rob
this nation of the invaluable treasure of 30,000 seamen and
all the profits of their employment; or in other words, the
Northern colonies, who contribute nothing to our riches
and our power, deprive us of more than twice the amount
of all the navigation we enjoy in consequence of the sugar
islands, the Southern, continental, and tobacco settlements !
The freight of the staples of those sets of colonies brings us
in upwards of a million sterling; that is, the navigation of
12,000 seamen: according to which proportion we lose by
the rivalry of the Northern colonies in this single article

98 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

two millions and a half sterling.’ To emphasize his
anguish, the writer put the ““T'wo Millions And A Half” in
capital letters. Colonial farmers also drew his wrath for,
he declared, ‘‘American corn cannot come to an European
market without doing mischief to the corn trade of
England.”

Trivial as it now seems in relative terms, colonial manu-
facturing set English capitalists by the ears. For example,
in 1751, English ironmasters, proprietors of forests that
supplied wood for smelting, and tanners who needed cheap
bark for their leather industry, all united in protesting
against American competition and induced a committee of
Parliament to heed their objections. ‘To make a tedious
economic story short, in every sphere of economy, American
business enterprise aroused the antagonism of rival interests
in England and the latter in turn brought to bear on the
government at London continuous pressure for legislation
and administrative acts favorable to British merchants,
shippers, and manufacturers.

Even the lucrative trade in finished commodities which
English capitalists managed to hold in spite of the efforts
of the colonies to supply themselves had within it the seeds
of irritation. For goods bought in English markets, the
colonists had no large supply of precious metals with which
to pay; they were always heavily in debt for commodi-
ties purchased and capital borrowed. Efforts to secure
specie, bills of exchange, and acceptable materials by means
of which to discharge their obligations in London kept them
at their wits’ ends.

The people of Rhode Island, by way of illustration, had
to find more than a hundred thousand pounds sterling a
year to pay for purchases made in England and yet they
produced locally only a few articles suitable for European
markets, such as flaxseed, lumber, and cheese. Conse-
quently it was necessary for them to compete with English
shippers by trading in some roundabout fashion, chiefly
through the West Indies, to secure the money and credit

THE GROWTH OF POWER 99

required to meet their English debts. Hardly more for-
tunate in their economy were the Southern planters;
although they had in tobacco a marketable staple, its price
was fixed in London and they were always hard pressed to
keep up with mounting obligations incurred for high living.

On every hand was heard the complaint of the critic
that scarcely a penny of specie escaped the vortex which
drew money in a torrent to the creditors of the metropolis.
In the best of circumstances the exigencies of the colonists
in this respect were very pressing; the irritation that arose
from them was severe and continuous; from this source
came the clamor for ‘‘easy money” that led local legis-
latures to issue paper currency until Parliament by peremp-
tory act put a stop to such measures of relief. Turn and
twist as they might, the colonists continually labored under
the disabilities of chronic debtors.

§

In connection with a network of trade covering half
the world, sprang up along the coast several thriving towns
which on the eve of the Revolution compared favorably
in wealth and population with such English cities as Liver-
pool and Bristol. Five stood at the head of the list—
Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charleston, and Newport
—the first with about twenty-five thousand inhabitants,
counting the suburbs, and the last with seven thousand.
Baltimore, Norfolk, Lancaster, and Albany, if not so popu-
lous, nevertheless took pride in their growing power.

These urban centers were the homes of three classes ~
destined to play significant roles in the launching of the
Revolution, namely, merchants, artisans, and lawyers. In |
every city were a few families that led the rest: the Amorys,
Hancocks, and Faneuils in Boston; the Whartons, Willings,
and Morrises of Philadelphia; the Livingstons, Crugers,
and Lows of New York; and the Browns of Providence—
“Nicky, Josey, John, and Mosey.” Rich, active, and

100 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

shrewd, they were quick to see points at which their interests
clashed with those of English competitors and to file pro-
tests against adverse legislation by Parliament; still, con-
servative at bottom and timid in the presence of violence,
they shrank from the thought of actual war.

When the storm broke and they had to choose, many
went over to the Tory cause; others vacillated and enlarged
their fortunes by selling supplies first to the Patriots and
then to the Tories as the tide of battle flowed and ebbed;
others threw themselves into the Revolution, helped to
finance it, and risked their lives and fortunes in the out-
come. John Hancock’s name headed the list of signers on
the Declaration of Independence; and it was written in
letters so large and firm that George III could see it with-
out his glasses. Robert Morris at Philadelphia flung his
property into the issue and gave his talents as treasurer to
the service of the Continental Congress.

Valuable, but sometimes troublesome, allies were the
artisans of the towns who furnished the sinews for stoning
English stamp agents, demolishing statues, sacking official
residences, and heaving cargoes into harbors. While mer-
chants resolved solemnly and petitioned gravely, artisans
shouted hoarsely and rioted vigorously, shocking the timid
gentry of store and warehouse who hoped that the business
of resisting British measures might be conducted with the
decorum of the counting room.

More cautious but especially useful in all verbal contests
of economics or politics were the lawyers. Only by gradual
~ stages had they been raised to a high status. In the early
days there was no place for them; indeed, they were not
viewed with favor by pioneers engaged in the rough work
of clearing the wilderness. The authors of the Massa-
chusetts Body of Liberties adopted in 1641, besides ex-
pressly permitting every litigant to plead his own cause,
were careful to provide that, if unable to help himself and
forced to employ an assistant, he was to give his counsel
“noe fee or reward for his paines.”’ In the founding years

THE GROWTH OF POWER 101

of Maryland a local chronicler rendered thanks that there
were no lawyers in that colony and no business to occupy
such factious members of a community.

In the course of time, however, conditions changed and
old prejudices disappeared. When society became more
complex and legal questions more involved, the need of
skilled attorneys was recognized and in every colony a class
of professional practitioners came into existence, which
grew rapidly in numbers and influence during the passing
decades of the eighteenth century. The door once opened,
lawyers managed to win a higher social position in America
than their brethren had ever enjoyed in the mother country.
Still true to feudal tradition, the English nobleman and fox-
hunting squire looked down on the attorney as a kind of
serving man, useful in drawing papers though hardly to be
treated as an equal; but there was no such gulf to be
bridged in America. Merchants, planters, and farmers of
the colonies could erect no insurmountable barriers against
the disciples of Coke and Lyttleton.

In politics, similarly—in town meetings and in assemblies
—lawyers flourished more abundantly than in England. It
was the fashion of English landlords and merchants to elect
men of their own order to represent them in Parliament but
in America, particularly in the Northern colonies, the voters
for various reasons more frequently adopted the practice
of choosing lawyers to speak for them in local bodies.
In the first colonial conference held in New York in 1690,
two of the seven members were lawyers; of the twenty-four
men who attended the Albany congress of 1754, thirteen
belonged to the legal profession; in the first Continental
Congress that launched the Revolution, twenty-four of the
forty-five delegates were lawyers; in the second Congress
that declared independence, twenty-six of the fifty-six dele-
gates were of that class; and in the convention that framed
the federal Constitution, thirty-three of the fifty-five mem-
bers were lawyers.

With good reason, therefore, did Edmund Burke, in

102 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

enumerating the forces that made America dangerous,
assign a special place to the legal profession. While warn-
ing his parliamentary colleagues against the perils of colo-
nial agitations, he laid particular emphasis on the proclivi-
ties of the legal occupation. He told his auditors that the
study of the law was more general in America perhaps than
in any other country; that the profession there was numer-
ous and powerful; that representatives sent to the con-
gresses were mainly lawyers; that training in law made men
‘acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in
defense, and full of resource.’”’ “Then he submitted with
a broad hint the idea that ‘“‘when great honors and great
emoluments do not win this knowledge to the service of
the state, it is a formidable adversary of government.”

In rising to social and political power the lawyers gave
a peculiar twist to the rhetoric of American statecraft.
“Before their time, the men who followed intellectual
pursuits had been chiefly preachers of the gospel—even the
teachers for the grammar schools and colleges had been
taken from this class; and while the theologians dominated
intellectual interests, weapons for argument, secular as well
—as religious, were drawn from Biblical lore. The lawyers,
on the other hand, consulted and enlarged a body of learn-
ing that was secular in nature. Moreover, it was their
business to use their learning on any side of any case
entrusted to their care, so that they became even more
flexible and more adept in dispute than the Hoopers and
the Mathers. 7

Accordingly, the lawyers were well equipped to assume
the lead in every public controversy and in fact they did
stand in the forefront of the conflict with the mother coun-
try. Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Madison, Dick-
inson, Marshall, William Livingston, and many others of
light and power in the Revolution were attorneys by train-
ing, if not engaged in the active practice of law. Such were
the’ men who furnished most of the arguments and state
papers of the struggle. Such were the men who gave to

THE GROWTH OF POWER 103

the philosophy and pleas of that great litigation a legal
and constitutional garb—one contrasting strangely with
the devices of the Puritan revolution more than a hun-
dred years before. In Cromwell’s day quotations from
the Bible as well as the sonorous words of Coke and
Lyttleton gave reason to determination and fed the appetite
for justification. In the American Revolution, however,
statesmen and soldiers, led and taught by lawyers, resorted
mainly to charters, laws, prescriptive rights, parchment, and
seals for high sanction, thus giving a peculiar cast of
thought and ornament to the linguistic devices of the fray.
When these weapons broke in their hands, they turned, not
_to theology, but to another secular armory—nature and the
imprescriptible rights written by sunbeams in the hearts
of men.
§

A large part of the labor which underlay the social fabric
of the American colonies was furnished by semi-servile
whites imported under bond for a term of years and by .,
Negroes sold into chattel slavery. ‘This is one phase of ~
American history which professional writers have usually
seen fit to pass over with but a sidelong glance. Bancroft
admitted that having ‘‘a handful’ of data on the subject,
he ‘“‘opened his little finger.” In fact, although exhaustive
researches have not been made for all the colonies, it seems
probable that at least one-half the immigrants into America ~
before the Revolution, certainly outside New England,
were either indentured servants or Negro slaves.

The white servants fell into two classes. The first em-—
braced those who voluntarily bound themselves for a term
of years to pay their passage. ‘The second class included
those who were carried here against their will—hustled on
board ships, borne across the sea, and sold into bondage.
This gruesome trafic was a regular business darkened by
many tragedies and illuminated by few romances. ‘The
streets of London were full of kidnappers, “‘spirits,’’ as they

104 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

were called; no workingman was safe; the very beggars were
afraid to speak with anyone who mentioned the terrifying
word ‘‘America.”’ Parents were torn from their homes,
husbands from their wives, to disappear forever as if swal-
lowed up in death. Children were bought from worthless
fathers, orphans from their guardians, dependent or unde-
sirable relatives from families weary of supporting them.

To the great army of involuntary immigrants were added
thousands of convicts who were either sent by English
judges or who chose deportation in place of fines, prisons,
stripes, or the gallows. No doubt many of this class were
criminals and incorrigible rascals, but a large portion were
the luckless victims of savage laws enacted to protect the
property of the ruling classes in England—peasants caught
shooting rabbits on some landlord’s estate or servant girls
charged with purloining a pair of stockings or a pocket
handkerchief. Mingled with this motley array of victims
were political offenders who had taken part in unsuccessful
agitations and uprisings.

The fate of all white servants, whether they voluntarily
chose to sell themselves for a term of years to get to
America, or were transported against their will, was very
much the same. ‘They were bound to serve some master
for a period of years ranging from five to seven. ‘They
were not tied to the soil, as were the serfs of the middle
ages, nor sold like slaves into life-long servitude, but during
their term of bondage they were under many disabilities.
The penalties imposed upon them for offenses against the
law were heavier than those laid upon freemen; if they
attempted to escape or committed a crime their term of
service could be increased; they could not marry, leave their
place of work, or engage in any occupation, without the
consent of their masters.

Absolutely at the beck and call of their owners, they could
be severely punished for laziness or neglect of duty. They
were, in fact, little better off than slaves while their servi-
tude lasted; their fate depended upon the whims of their

THE GROWTH OF POWER 105

masters; and at best it was harsh enough. When the weary
years of indenture were over, the bondmen were set free
to enter any occupation for which they were qualified. The
more fortunate became independent artisans or went into
the interior, where they found liberty as the tillers of small
farms, rising out of bondage into freedom. But others,
weighed down by their heritage, individual and social, sank
into that hopeless body of ‘‘poor whites,” the proletariat
of the countryside.

Finding it difficult to secure an adequate supply of in-
dentured servants, promoters of settlements turned in the
course of time to Negro slavery. Neither the Puritans nor
the Cavaliers had fixed scruples against the enslavement of
their fellow men, of their own or any other color; it seems
to have been necessity rather than choice that forced them
to resort to Africans. Both sought to reduce Indians to
bondage and to a slight extent were successful; but the
haughty spirit of the red man made him a poor worker
under the lash.

Nor did the Puritans of England show any invincible
repugnance to driving white men and women into perpetual
servitude; Cromwell thought the Irish well adapted to that
career, for he sold as slaves in the Barbadoes all the garri-
son that was not killed in the Drogheda massacre, and his
agents made a business of combing Ireland for boys and
girls to be auctioned to English planters in the West Indies.
Even Cromwell’s own countrymen were sometimes caught
in the dragnet; there is in the archives of London a piteous
petition of seventy Englishmen carried off from Plymouth
and sold in the West Indies “for 1,550 pound weight of
sugar a piece, more or less.’’ Nevertheless, by the latter
part of the seventeenth century, public opinion in England
was running against this form of domestic enterprise and in
favor of seeking slaves abroad.

Though Negro slavery had been common in the Spanish
provinces for more than a hundred years when Virginia was
founded, and though Elizabethan seamen had leaped with

106 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

enthusiasm into the slave trade long before English colo-
nization began, the institution spread slowly in the seaboard
regions after its introduction at Jamestown in 1619. At
the end of three decades there were only about three hun-
dred Africans in the Old Dominion. But before the close of
the century the traffic in slaves had grown to immense pro-
portions. Negroes had shown themselves more docile under
bondage than their Nordic brethren, and the difficulty of
obtaining an adequate supply of white servants had in-
creased. Moreover, English and American capitalists had
discovered that enormous profits were to be gathered from
the carrying trade, and under that stimulus made the trans-
port of Africans to the New World one of the most lucra-
tive branches of the shipping business. The best families,
noblemen, bishops, merchant princes, and politicians in-
vested heavily in it and the English government took good
care of their interests. When, for instance, the court of
Madrid was humbled in the war of the Spanish Succession, it
was forced, in 1713, to grant to English slavers the exclusive
right of carrying Negroes to its colonies, saving to Their
Majesties, the Kings of England and Spain, each one-fourth
of the profits.

Between that year and 1780, it is estimated, twenty
thousand slaves were annually carried over the sea; in 1771
nearly two hundred English ships were engaged in the
trafic, mainly from Liverpool, London, and Bristol. The
first of these cities, in fact, owed much of its prosperity to
the trade, and not without reason did a celebrated actor,
when hissed by his audience in that commercial metropolis,
fling back the taunt: ‘The stones of your houses are ce-
mented with the blood of African slaves.”” The same could
have been said with equal justice of some New England
towns—Newport, Rhode Island, for example—because
the Puritans, quick to scent the profits of the business, were
not a whit behind the merchants of the mother country in
reaching for the harvest.

In the bitter annals of the lowly there is no more ghastly

THE GROWTH OF POWER 107

chapter than the story of this trade in human flesh. The
poor wretches snatched from Africa were herded like cattle
in the fetid air of low and windowless ship pens. If water
ran short, or famine threatened, or plague broke out, whole
cargoes, living and dead, were hurled overboard by merci-
less masters. If a single victim, tortured into frenzy,
lifted a finger against his captor, he was liable to be pun-
ished by a mutilation that defies description. While Ruskin
has attempted to fix the picture of this trade in his immortal
etching of Turner’s Slave Ship, tossing under a heaven of
broken clouds upon a storm-swept sea dotted with the
bodies of victims, ‘‘girded with condemnation in that fearful
hue which signs the sky with horror and mixes its flaming
flood with sunlight—and cast far along the sepulchral waves
——incarnadines the multitudinous sea,’ his luminous page
sinks down into a dull glow when compared with the lurid
leaves in the actual records of the slaving business.

Under the pressure of profitmakers the Southern colo-
nists, always clamoring for cheap labor, were in time
abundantly supplied with African bond men and even in the
North, slavery spread as widely as economic conditions —
would permit. After tentative beginnings, the Negro popu-”
lation grew by leaps and bounds; on the eve of the Revolu-
tion it was more than half a million. In five colonies,
Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, it equaled
or exceeded the whites in number; even in Delaware and
Pennsylvania, one-fifth of the inhabitants were Negroes.
In New York one person in six, and in New England one
in fifty sprang from African origins.

Though the figures were ominous, not many Englishmen
made strenuous protests against slavery. The Quakers,
as a rule, did not like it for it offended their religious
scruples, and some of them openly declared that Christians
could not tolerate it; but no extensive movement for aboli-
tion got under way until after Independence. There were,
however, frequent outcries against the slave trade itself.
An occasional far-seeing economist realized that, owing to

108 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the greed of the traffickers, the white population was in
danger of being swamped; breeders who raised slaves for
the domestic market naturally resented the competition of
the importers; and masters already well supplied grew
anxious as they saw the value of their property falling with
the continued influx of new stock. In response to such con-
siderations, a few of the colonies attempted to prohibit the
slave trade, only to be defeated by royal vetoes. The ruling
classes of England were in no mood to cut off the princely
dividends received from that lucrative branch of English
commerce and the volume of business seems to have
increased with fair regularity until the crash of the
Revolution.

While the owners of manors, plantations, and huge
estates found little difficulty in obtaining labor for
their fields, those who sought to develop manufacturing had
no such good fortune. Various inducements, such as special
privileges and bounties, were offered to skilled artisans in
England to attract them to America, but with little success.
Furthermore, those who did come were seldom content to
work long for masters. As soon as a journeyman or ap-
prentice became well acquainted with the trade of the
country, he hurried out into a new settlement to establish
himself in a small but independent business, or finding that
he could buy a farm with a few years’ savings, he shook
the dust of the towns off his feet and went into the country
in search of economic freedom. ‘‘So vast is the terri-
tory of North America,” wrote Franklin, ‘‘that it will re-
quire many ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled,
labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues
long to labor for others.” Accordingly, the merchant cap-
italist of the colonial era, who engaged a few skilled work-
men to manufacture for his trade, was continually handi-
capped, except in times of business depression, by the lack
of an abundant supply of docile labor. Still there was
springing up in the chief centers, such as Boston, New York,
and Philadelphia, a body of artisans numerous enough to

THE GROWTH OF POWER 109

give no little trouble to the local governing classes when the
strong hand of Great Britain was shaken off.

§

As the economic structure of colonial America rose firmly
on its foundations there were also erected institutions of
self-government which served the ruling orders well in the
management of their affairs and in the conflicts with the
mother country. For centuries, the upper classes of Eng-
land had shared in the levying of taxes and the making of
laws and, with perfect ease, parliamentary practices were
transplanted to the New World. Soon after its inception,
every colony could boast of a popular assembly elected by
voters who possessed the established property qualifications.
Virginia was little more than a decade old when, under the
auspices of the London Company, a House of Burgesses
chosen by the planters was called into being. Within four
years of its first expedition, the Massachusetts Bay Com-
pany substituted a representative body for the general meet-
ing of the corporation’s members. Knowing full well that
they could not attract settlers to their domains if they
withheld all political privileges, the proprietors, such as
Lord Baltimore and William Penn, early complied with the
requirements of their charters by inviting colonists to join
in the government of their respective enterprises.

In each colony the representative assembly, by whatever
process instituted, was elected by the property owners. The
qualifications imposed on voters were often modified but in
every change the power of property, in accordance with
English traditions, was expressly recognized. In the South,
where agriculture was the great economic interest, land was
the basis of the suffrage; Virginia, for example, required
the elector in town or country to be a freeholder, an owner
of land—a farm or a town lot of a stated size. Where agri-
culture and trade divided the honors, politics reflected the
fact; in Massachusetts, for instance, the suffrage was con-

110 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ferred upon all men who owned real estate yielding forty
shillings a year income, or possessed other property to the
value of £40. Pennsylvania, likewise combining commerce
and farming, allowed all men who held personal property
worth £50, as well as freeholders, to vote for assemblymen.
To the property tests were sometimes added religious pro-
visions: Catholics and Jews were often disfranchised by law
and to some extent in practice.

Although property was widely distributed in America and
most of the free colonists were Protestants and Gentiles,
the various limitations on the suffrage excluded from the
polls a large portion of the population—just how large a
percentage cannot be ascertained from any records now
available. Certainly, in the country districts of Pennsyl-
vania, half the adult males were denied the ballot; in
Philadelphia the restrictions disfranchised about nine-tenths
of the men, a sore point with a growing class of artisans,
and an interesting side light on the concentration of prop-
erty in that urban area. On the other hand, it is estimated
that about four-fifths of the men in Massachusetts were
eligible to vote, so numerous were the owners of small
farms.

Perhaps more citizens were kept from the polls by indif-
ference than by law. A large share of the population of the
colonies, it must be remembered, came from classes in Eng-
land and in Europe that had never taken part in the
governing process. Asa rule, English agricultural laborers
and artisans had enjoyed no more political rights than
French Huguenots or German peasants; and transportation
to the New World could not automatically give any of them
a political sense. At all events, it seems safe to say that

from one-half to two-thirds of the adult males did not vote, ~—

even in Massachusetts where interest in political affairs ran
unusually high.

The weight of the active property owners in colonial gov-
ernment was further enhanced by qualifications upon mem-
bers of assemblies. In South Carolina, for illustration, an

THE GROWTH OF POWER 111

assemblyman had to be a man of real substance, the owner
of five hundred acres of land and ten slaves, or the possessor
of land, houses, or other property worth a thousand pounds
sterling. In New Jersey only freeholders possessed of a
thousand acres of land could sit in the representative
chamber. So, by one method or another, control in the
popular assemblies of the American colonies was con-
centrated in the hands of a somewhat compact body of
propertied men, freeholders, merchants, and planters, hav-
ing a common interest in resisting taxation.

These little parliaments enjoyed powers which were no-
where strictly defined in laws, charters, and decrees. From
small and obscure beginnings they grew in dignity until they
took on some of the pomp and circumstance long associated
with the House of Commons. In the course of time they
claimed as their own and exercised in fact the right of laying
taxes, raising troops, incurring debts, issuing currency, fixing
the salaries of royal officers, and appointing agents to rep-
resent them in their dealings with the government at
London; and, going beyond such functions, they covered
by legislation of their own wide domains of civil and crim-
inal law—subject always to the terms of charters, acts of
Parliament, and the prerogatives of the Crown.

Endowed with such impressive authority, these assemblies
naturally drew to themselves all the local interests which
were struggling to realize their demands in law and
ordinance. They were the laboratories in which were
formulated all the grievances of the colonists against the
government of England. They were training schools where
lawyers could employ their talents in political declamation,
in outwitting royal officers by clever legal devices. In short,
in the representative assemblies were brought to a focus ~
the designs and passions of those rising economic groups
which gave strength to America and threw her into oppo-
sition to the governing classes of the mother country.
Serving as the points of contact with royal officers and the
English Crown, they received the first impact of battle when

112 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

laws were vetoed and instructions were handed out by the -
king’s governors or the agents of the proprietors.

§

While the local assemblies, speaking for American farm-
ers, planters, and merchants, were advancing by a steady
extension of powers to the position of sovereign legislatures,
agencies were developed by the British Crown and Parlia-
ment to check and control the swelling authority of colonial
democracy. Chief among these agencies was the royal or
provincial governor.. By a gradual process, beginning with
the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624 and
ending with the extinction of the Georgia corporation in ~
1752, eight of the thirteen colonies became royal provinces,
that is, their executive departments were in the hands of
governors appointed by the King of England. In three,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, the old proprietary
system remained in force until 1776, keeping the governors
equally independent of popular assemblies. Only two,
Rhode Island and Connecticut, retained the right to elect
their own executives through all changes of the colonial
period, and they were the objects of suspicion to the British
imperialists who feared the “‘democratical” pretensions of
America.

If the friends of “‘high-toned government” could have
had their way, every colony would have been reduced to a
single scheme—the province administered by an independ-
ent executive and judiciary sustained by permanent revenues
collected under parliamentary authority. Events proved,
however, that it was only necessary to have eight royal
governors to set thirteen communities aflame.

Although there was a wide variety in the types of gov-
ernors chosen in the course of a century or more to admin-
ister colonial affairs, they showed a general tendency toward
conformity to pattern. Usually they sprang from ruling
classes long accustomed to looking upon government as a

THE GROWTH OF POWER Ls

- system of patronage and emoluments—classes that brought
increasing pressure on the Crown and ministers for promo-
tion, places, and pensions as England grew in wealth and
population. There were only fifty-nine temporal peers in
the last Parliament of Queen Elizabeth; by the opening of
the eighteenth century the number had risen to one hundred
and sixty-eight ; between 1700 and 1760, there were created
twenty-six dukes, nineteen marquises, seventy-one earls,
fifty-three viscounts, and one hundred and eleven barons,
besides numerous baronets, knights, and decorated persons.
‘‘Peerages, baronetcies, and other titles of honor, patronage
and court favor for the rich!” exclaimed May. ‘Places,
pensions, and bribes for the needy!”

Of such was the stuff of English politics in the eighteenth
century. To the spoils of domestic office, the numerous
posts in India and America merely added more jobs for
dexterous suppliants. No poet had yet coined a phrase like
“the white man’s burden”’ or ‘‘public service” to give ethical
tone to the operations of those who labored at the ends of
the empire.

Most of the royal executives for the American provinces
were selected from among English politicians, soldiers, and
lawyers of an adventurous temper; a few were taken from
the more pliant placemen in the colonies. Some of the gov-
ernors were able administrators of comprehensive views,
prepared to live on good terms with the king’s subjects
committed to their care. Others were martinets with the
morals and manners of an English drill sergeant. A few
were frankly coarse and brutal; of this tendency was
Berkeley of Virginia, who rejoiced in the absence of schools
and newspapers and took pleasure in drowning with blood
Nathaniel Bacon’s uprising. ‘“The old fool,” cried Charles
IT, when he heard of the wholesale executions, “has taken
more lives in that naked country, than I for the murder of
my father.”’

On one thing a very large portion of the governors were
agreed, namely, the increase of their private fortunes.

114 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

William Burnet, almost ruined by the bursting of the South .
Sea Bubble and sorely taxed to support his large family,
was given first the province of New York and then the
vineyard of Massachusetts. Robert Hunter, who had
fought at Blenheim and commanded the “ready art of pro-
curing money,” was allowed to labor in New York and New
Jersey. John Montgomerie, after serving in the royal
army and then the bedchamber division of the king’s house-
hold, was sent to the same domain to enlarge his inheritance.
Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, though grave and learned,
concealed under his cool exterior a passion for money; his
sons were deep in the Boston tea business; his private letters
teem with references to prices and qualities.

{n a paper presented to the board of trade as early as

1715, an observer at the center of things and in a position
to know, rendered an opinion to the effect that the colonial
ofices were “sometimes given as a reward for services
done to the crown and with the design that such persons
shall thereby make their fortunes. But they are generally
obtained by the favor of great men to some of their depend-
ents or relatives and they have sometimes been given to
persons who were obliged to divide the profits of them with
those by whose means they were procured.” ‘To the victors
belonged the spoils, and the assembly of New York had
authority for declaring that the governors seldom had any
regard for the welfare of the people, made it subservient
to their own particular interest, and, knowing that their
time in office was limited, made haste to employ all the
engines calculated “‘to raise estates to themselves.”’
_ It is not necessary to say with Bancroft that America was
“the hospital of Great Britain for its decayed members of
Parliament and abandoned courtiers,” but in seeking for
the roots of the controversy that split the British empire
we cannot ignore the strife over the profits of office and the
symbols of power—a struggle as old as the politics of Rome
and as new as the latest election.

In the train of the English executive came a horde of

THE GROWTH OF POWER — 115

place hunters; for the governor, except in Massachusetts,
appointed his councilors and everywhere filled lucrative
posts—administrative, judicial, and military. Some of
these places opened the way for peculation in obtaining
and confirming grants; the land office in Virginia was a
sink of corruption. Others were merely clerical positions
attractive to the less ambitious dependents in the governor’s
oficial family. Many were sinecures for, following the
_fashion in England, royal governors created offices with
salaries and no duties, to smooth the path for friends in
need. In South Carolina and Maryland the sale of political
jobs was notorious; in New Jersey an industrious governor,
after taking care of many applicants, solicited from the
Crown a place for “my son Billy’’; and everywhere the dis-
posal of patronage was viewed as a branch of colonial trade.
Such practices were by no means deemed reprehensible at ~
the time; they were true to the course of use and wont in
contemporary England, where party servants were openly
rewarded with honors, places, and titles at the public
expense.

While devoting personal attention to the luxuries of
office, the more efficient of the royal governors labored hard
at devising administrative policies of benefit to the ruling
classes of England whose economic interests were at stake
in colonial management. Sir Francis Bernard, who saw
long service in Massachusetts, was one of the proconsuls
given to such mental exercises.

With respect to economics, he evolved a plan that was
simplicity itself. ‘“The two great objects of Great Britain
in regard to the American trade,” he said, ‘‘must be to
oblige her American subjects to take from Great.Britain
only, all the manufactures and European goods which she
can supply them with: 2. To regulate the foreign trade
of the Americans so that the profits thereof may finally
center in Great Britain, or be applied to the improvement
of her empire. Whenever these two purposes militate
against each other, that which is most advantageous to

116 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Great Britain ought to be preferred.” That was clear and
to the point.

In politics, Governor Bernard was no less explicit, sug-
gesting that the council in each province should resemble as
nearly as possible the House of Lords and be composed
of persons of wealth enjoying some such title as baron or
baronet, all bound to look to the British Crown for honors
and appreciation. This happy system was to be perfected
by establishing a permanent revenue with which to pay the
provincial governors, councilors, judges, and other officers
civil and military—a permanent revenue furnished by the
colonial legislatures as ordered by act of Parliament.
Under this grand design, places and jobs in the imperial
government were to become parts of the general royal
patronage. Perhaps not many governors saw the goal as
clearly as did Bernard, but no doubt the prevailing adminis-
trative opinion supported his views. Certainly, as the hour
of the American Revolution drew near, British policy was
moving in the direction indicated by that indefatigable
governor.

§

Naturally, the salaries, emoluments, land grants, and
other perquisites of colonial politics, so highly prized by
royal governors, were not trifles unconsidered by members
of American legislatures. Permanent residents with life
estates in the country, the assemblymen could hardly fail
to regard the governor from over the ocean as an interloper
entitled to small esteem. It cost them no little grief to see
lucrative offices filled by henchmen engaged in gainful em-
ployments at their expense, and still more anguish to see
a royal governor and his train, after a season of suppressed
desires in the stuffy atmosphere of the province, depart for
the metropolis, laden with spoils, to enjoy a term of pleasing
luxury in London.

These observant assemblymen were not, however, with-
out resources. Holding the purse strings, they could be

THE GROWTH OF POWER 117

negligent, if not niggardly, in making grants of money to
keep up the style of the petty court at the capital; they
could darken the days of the colonial governor with bicker-
ings Over concessions, appointments, and other favors as
the price of money grants. “I have to steer between Scylla
and Charybdis,’’ complained Belcher of New Jersey; ‘‘to
please the king’s ministers at home and a touchy people
here; to luff for one and bear away for another.”’ He might
have added, ‘‘and truck and huckster to get my salary from
the people’s representatives.’ Governor Dinwiddie of Vir-
ginia found his legislature ‘obstinate, self-opinionated; a
stubborn generation.”” A governor of New York who asked
the assembly to vote him a fixed revenue for five years was
answered by a demand for the right to appoint every officer
deriving emoluments from the grant. Enraged by this bold-
ness, the governor prorogued the assembly and wrote home
that the members had taken to themselves ‘‘the sole power
of rewarding all services and in effect the nomination to all
offices, by granting the salary annually, not to the office,
but by name to the person in the office.” The remedy for
such an encroachment on royal authority, in the opinion
of the distressed agent of the Crown, was an act of Parlia-
ment reducing New York to order. ‘Till then,’’ he added,
‘‘T cannot meet the assembly without danger of exposing the
king’s authority and myself to contempt.”

In this conflict, the fortunes of war were ultimately on
the side of the American assembly. Like the English House
of Commons, it held the local purse, that powerful engine
by which the Crown had been subjected to Parliament.
Without legislative grant, there was no money for salaries
—a dilemma which could not be avoided by any political
legerdemain. Moreover, many governors were as eager to
find places for their dependents as to uphold any fine
notions of royal prerogative; without appropriation acts,
the best of jobs were worthless even to the finest of public
servants. In the end, therefore, the popular branch of the
colonial legislature became almost sovereign in this sphere.

118 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

On the eve of the Revolution, the royal and proprietary
governors, beggars at the door of the assemblies, were pow-
erless to enforce by civil process their instructions from
England; provincial councils had lost most of their control
over law-making; and judges and minor officers had to trim
to the legislators to avoid putting their salaries in jeopardy.
For practical purposes the colonial assemblies, in their do-
mestic concerns, were their own masters and their strength
was increasing. ‘The revolution had actually taken place;
nothing but an explosion was necessary to announce it to
the world. Such at least is the judgment of those modern
scholars who have worked in the dusty records of colonial
times rather than in the memoirs of kings, courtiers, and
politicians.

§

Thus, possessing a ruling class experienced in the art of
government and commanding economic resources of great
magnitude, the provinces needed only two things to trans-
form them into an independent nation—a mastery of the-art
of warfare and the capacity to cooperate on a continental
scale. In these branches of statecraft also the eventful years
of colonial development gave them some exercise. For self-
defense they were compelled to maintain local forces, drilled
and disciplined under officers of their own choice, prepared
to take part at any moment in desperate fighting with
frontier Indians and to test their endurance under fire.

In every one of the violent conflicts in the struggle be-
tween England and France over the mastery of North
America, the colonists participated, furnishing soldiers and
supplies. Four times, between 1689 and 1763, they were
called upon to share in this world-wide contest for imperial
supremacy—in King William’s, Queen Anne’s, King
George’s, and the Seven Years’ War. For thirty-one years
out of seventy-four they had armed men at the front bat-
tling by the side of British regulars against French and
Indian warriors skilled in field and forest fighting, ruthless

THE GROWTH OF POWER 119

with bayonet and scalping knife. Not a generation passed
without a baptism of fire—without giving the colonists
experience in the use of that unanswerable argument of sov-
ereignty, military force.

War also taught the colonies, so diverse in their interests

and so hostile to one another in religion and politics, the
art of codperation,. It was the common deadly fear of the
Indians that brought into being the New England Confed- ~
eration of 1643, uniting Massachusetts, Plymouth, Con-
necticut, and New Haven for twenty years or more in a
league of offense, defense, and mutual service. It was also
the Indian menace, years afterward, that put the militiamen
of Virginia and the Carolinas under arms in a mutual enter-
prise. It was to prepare the Americans for general defense ~
and for the impending struggle with France that the famous
colonial conference was held in Albany in 1754, attended
by representatives. of New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and
Maryland. Although the plan of union there discussed was
never adopted, Franklin, who drew it, lived to serve as a
member of the convention which drafted the Constitution
of the United States. The Albany conference failed, but
the French and Indian war that broke out three years later
drove the colonies into codperation on a continental scale.

As events proved, that was the last phase in the mighty
contest for the heart of North America. The French, who
had established themselves at Quebec in 1608, one year
after the founding of Jamestown, and at New Orleans
in 1718, fourteen years before the settlement of Georgia,
had planted post after post in the Ohio and Mississippi
Valleys and had served notice that English enterprise was
to be confined to the coast line. When in 1753 the soldiers
of King Louis raised their flag over Fort Duquesne on the
headwaters of the Ohio, they flung out a challenge which
even the most pacific Quaker in Philadelphia had to
heed. And the gesture was quickly answered. George
Washington, a young militia officer of Virginia, was sent

120 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

to the frontier to warn the invaders that they were on
territory “notoriously known to be the property of the
Crown of Great Britain,” and he might have added
‘coveted by the Ohio Land Company recently formed to
open up the West.”

‘Thus it happened that the first shot in a war that was
to encircle the globe was fired in the wilds of Pennsylvania
and the man who was to command the armies of the United
States in the struggle for independence heard it echo
through the forests. There began a conflict—the Seven
Years’ War—that spread to Europe, involving England
and Prussia on one hand and France, Austria, Spain, and
minor powers on the other; that flamed up in India deciding
the fate of teeming millions on the other side of the world.

Under the imperial genius of William Pitt, who employed
men and treasure without stint in his effort to smash French
power on the sea and wreck French empire in three conti-
nents, all the energies of England were engaged. Prussia
was kept in line under Frederick the Great by princely
subsidies; America was fused by the fierce heat of the con-
flict at her very doors. Though Braddock was defeated in
the wilds of Pennsylvania in 1755, Wolfe restored the
balance four years later by capturing Quebec and ringing
out the doom of French dominion in Canada. When at
last peace came formally in 1763, Canada and all the terri-
tory east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, passed
under the British flag; while the rest went to Spain, whose
empire was already weakening at its extremities. With no
powerful neighbors now thundering at their gates, the gov-
erning classes of the thirteen American colonies were free
to try their strength with the governing classes of England.

Indeed, the very war that set the bells of London ring-
ing in acclaim to the news of victories borne on every breeze
opened the way for another explosion. When Pitt fell and
the end came, sober accountants had to reckon the cost:
the public debt of England stood at one hundred and forty
millions and new taxes had to be provided to meet the

THE GROWTH OF POWER 121

charges. Who was to pay? In any event, the colonists,
having put twenty-five thousand men into the field and sus-
tained them by huge outlays, were in no mood to bear
additional burdens. To make matters worse, the swollen
war prices collapsed, forcing a liquidation such as usually
follows a desperate world conflict, and bringing ruin in its
train. There lay the causes of new clashes with the English
governing machine. h
And America was ready for a trial of strength. The war
had developed a body of veterans—officers and men—who
were in some measure at least prepared for the test of Revo-
lution when it came. The war had done more. The
haughty conduct of the British military officers in America
had aroused in the breasts of the colonials a passionate
resentment akin to their ill-will for royal governors; while
experience in fighting had given confidence to militiamen.
In many cases they had done badly themselves but on other
occasions they had seen the pomp of British officers and
the pride of British regulars pricked like bubbles. ‘The
disaster which overwhelmed Braddock, as Franklin said,
‘“‘save us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas
of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well
founded.” It was no mere accident that the young officer
who had labored to save Braddock’s forces from utter ruin
in the wilderness of Pennsylvania was called upon twenty
years later to draw his sword under the elm at Cambridge
in defense of the American Revolution.

CHAPTER IV

Provincial America

HE culture of the colonial period—its social and reli-

gious life, its intellectual and esthetic interests, its
apparatus for the diffusion of knowledge and artis-

tic appreciation—was subject to the conditions common to

all provincial civilizations. In its origins it was derivative:

the whole conventional heritage, from its noblest ideals to
its grossest vulgarities, was European, ina strict sense, Eng-
lish. Like the culture of every other age, it was contingent
upon the prevailing economic order, the modes of securing
a livelihood, the disposition of classes, the accumulation of
riches, the development of patronage and leisure, the con-
centration of population, and the diversification of practical
experience. Of necessity also it was bent to the laws of
change, affected in every sphere by transformations in
the character and weight of economic classes, the growth
of secular concerns, and the impact of fresh currents
of opinion from abroad.

Materials for the history of colonial culture are rich

beyond measure. ‘The spirit of the age shoulders up out
j Wp

_—

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 123

of the dead past into the living present in a thousand shapes
and forms. In haunting shadows the domestic life hovers
around old houses, gray and gabled, crowned by cowls of
arching elms and spreading oaks. Counterpanes and rugs
seem even now to be taking form under nimble fingers that
were moldering in village churchyards when Thomas
Jefferson’s pen was tracing the Declaration of Independ-
ence. Paintings that hang on walls, as they did in the days
of Franklin and Washington, call back to power masters
and mistresses from classes that ruled and preached and
traded and planted in those far-off times. Diaries and
letters lift the curtain on gay hours of weddings, fox hunts,
and balls and on solemn scenes of worship, tragedy, and
death. Quaint towns planned with strong communal pur-
pose, state houses, churches, and college halls, still solid
under the weight of years, survive as the visible and out:
ward symbols of vigorous public life. Stagecoaches and
models of sailing vessels reveal colonial merchants and
wayfarers traveling on land and sea. Narratives and jour-
nals throw the light of contemporary opinion on the passing
panorama. Books, pamphlets, almanacs, newspapers, and
magazines produced on the soil of the New World reflect
the depths and shallows of the American intellect; libraries,
public and private, collected from the corners of Europe,
mark the wide range of colonial research and understanding.

In this treasury of riches diverse minds have been at
work; fragments have been selected from it to fit the pat-
terns of many special interests. Enthusiastic makers of
family traditions, moved by sentiments as deep as ancestor
worship, have disclosed under the radiance of their warm
desires progenitors as proud and gracious as the Burleighs
and Percys of old England. Simple collectors of curios
have gathered up pewter plate, glass, and Windsor chairs.
Novelists have discovered plots and preachers have un-
earthed themes. MHurried critics, feeding the maw of the
modern press, have found illustrations to bolster curious
creeds and justify varied moods: a Baltimore journalist of

124 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

remote Teutonic origins has seen reflected in the records
the harsh and sour visage of Puritan divines; an Illinois
essayist reared in Pilgrim orthodoxy has seen shining from
them a great light to guide the weary and godly through
all eternity. Searchers for humane traditions have come
with joy upon the philosophy of Roger Williams, the
journal of John Woolman, the lively wisdom of Benjamin
Franklin, the democratic doctrines of John Wise, and the
grand plea of Andrew Hamilton in the Zenger battle over
the freedom of the press. Trained historians have brought
under observation single segments of colonial life—eco-
nomic, political, social, intellectual, artistic—and have
written for specialists huge tomes that never find their way
into the main stream of American thought.

By none of these methods apparently can the intimate
essence of American culture be grasped. In reality the
heritage, economics, politics, culture, and international
filiations of any civilization are so closely woven by fate
into one fabric that no human eye can discern the begin-
nings of its warp or woof. And any economic inter-
pretation, any political theory, any literary criticism, any
esthetic appreciation, which ignores this perplexing fact,
is of necessity superficial. ‘That a few students recognize
the nature of the problem and are beginning the search for
a synthesis is a striking sign of the new epoch in American
intellectual development.

§

The essential forms of colonial culture, as we have said,
were English in their origins. Eminent advocates for the
Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, Welsh, Swedes, and Jews have
entered pleas against this ruling in many a portly volume
and have placed upon the record facts and arguments
worthy of calm review. Some have gone far in their racial
claims. One stout partisan has traced the political institu-
tions of America back to Holland through the migrating
Pilgrims. Another has given the American Revolution the

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 125

appearance of a phase in the long contest between Scot
and Englishman. An eager Irishman has compiled from
crumbling papers and mossy tombstones a mighty roll of
O’Rourkes, O’Donahues, and O’Briens that makes colonial
history resemble a glorious page in the tale of Erin’s sons.
Nevertheless, when the last word is said for all the
diverse elements in provincial life, certain indubitable facts
obtrude themselves upon the view like giant boulders on a
plain. Beyond question, the overwhelming majority of
the white people i in the colonies were of English descent;
the arrangement of classes was English; the law which held
together the whole social order was English in essence,
modified, of course, but primarily English; the dominant
religious institutions and modes of theology were English
adaptations of Christianity; the types of formal education,
the amusements, furniture, fashions, art, and domestic codes
were all fundamentally English too. The language of bench
and bar, pulpit and press, was English. Pamphlets and
books of the epoch written in Dutch and German no doubt
fill a large space on the library shelf; but in truth they are
remarkable, not so much for their bulk, as for their relative
insignificance when measured against the huge mountain of
declamations and arguments in English that have come
down from that provincial age. The list of Scotch and
Irish soldiers in the revolutionary army is imposing; still
more so is the register of Englishmen. Presbyterians of
Pennsylvania fought well under Washington; the shot that
was heard round the world was fired at Concord by a
Puritan. Whether for praise, blame, or merriment, colonial
America was basically English; it was governed under the
auspices of the English ruling classes; its chief channels
of communication with Europe ran along English routes.

§

The prevailing class structure by which the provincial
culture of America was so largely conditioned was derived

126 THE RISE OF AMERICAN. CIVILIZATION

in the main from the mother country. Although it is some-
times imagined, on the basis of schoolbook fictions, that
the colonies were local democracies formed on the pure
principles of a New World philosophy and founded on
substantial economic equality, the facts of the case lend little
color to that view. In reality, by the colonizing process,
the middle orders of England—landed gentry of the minor
rank, merchants, and yeomen—with their psychology and
social values were reproduced in a new environment.
At home these classes had carried society forward on
the long road from feudalism to the modern age; in Amer-
ica, freed from the immediate pressure of a titled aris-
tocracy and clerical hierarchy, they advanced rapidly
ahead of their English contemporaries in the degree of
their sovereignty over matters of law, religion, intellect,
and esthetic interest. Every colony had this class heritage
developed into a well-articulated scheme of social subordi-
nation. It is true that the status of the ruling element was
not as plainly marked by legal signs as in the mother
country and that the gates of entry were slightly more ajar
but its grip upon industry and local politics was no less
secure.

In seaboard New England the dominant order was com-
posed principally of rich merchants, their dependents, and
advocates—a few of them the offspring of English gentry.
Though it rested a little lower in the social firmament than
the official families of royal governors, distinctions in dress,
houses, equipages, and manners separated it widely from
the farmers, artisans, and servile elements of the popu-
lation. ‘Most Boston merchants,” wrote a scion of later
days, ‘“‘owned slaves as house servants and bought and sold
them like other merchandise.”’ |

Of course titled persons in old England sniffed as they
caught the smell of tar and salt fish on the garments of the
mercantile order of the Bay but the sturdy Puritans did
not worry about the snub. They even boasted of the
smell. ‘‘Our ancestors came not here for religion. Their

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 127

main end was to catch fish,’ cried a Marblehead sailor when
the preacher laid on too hard. As if in defiance, the grand-
est old families of Boston and Salem decorated their man.
sions with graven models of the sacred cod and appeared
unashamed in the columns of the newspapers as dealers in
rum, salt, rope, pitch, grindstones, and fishing tackle.
Although bluebloods of ancient lineage might turn up
their noses, although the higher strata that pressed about
the royal governor might resent the intrusion of ‘‘new
people,” the salt-water merchants managed the politics of
New England legislatures with little interference from
farmers and mechanics and servants.

Below the Potomac the upper class had another economic
foundation—the landed estate kept intact from generation
to generation as in England by the rule of entail or primo-
geniture or both. Cherishing the conventional emotions
associated with the soil, Southern planters arrogated to
themselves all social prestige, scorning mercantile arts and
persons engaged in trade, except, perhaps, in Charleston
where occasionally a landed family augmented its fortune
by a happy jointure with the master of a counting house.

Like lords and squires in the mother country, slave-
owning barons took the lead in politics as they did in social
affairs. At elections held in the open air in county towns,
they easily cowed all but the bravest freeholding farmers
and named their own men for public offices. If a schism
among them threatened their dominion, they united again
with a swiftness that took the breath of the opposition.
Yeomanry from the hinterland often came to the provincial
capitals to tilt and charge but all in vain; the landed gentry
of the plain could not be unhorsed. Resorting to. private
tutors or to Oxford and Cambridge for their learning,
such as the times yielded, they staved off the growth of
popular education in the South and the restive democracy
connected with it.

Secure in their economic and political power, the planters
of Virginia soon assumed the style of the Cavalier. And

128 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

their descendants proudly carried on the tradition of Cay-
alier blood undisputed until a modern historian of scientific
temper, I. J. Wertenbaker, made a searching inquiry into
the facts of the case and published his findings. By way
of preface he pointed out that the title of Cavalier, far
from giving a clue to the possessor’s rank or lineage,
merely indicated membership in a political faction: many a
tinker cheered for King Charles.

Then, after a survey of genealogical tables, Wertenbaker
came to the conclusion that ‘‘a careful collection of the
names of the Cavaliers who were prominent enough to find
a place in the records shows that their number was insig-
nificant.” He could report only three families in all Vir-
ginia ‘“‘derived from English houses of historic note’? and
three more that sprang from “‘the minor gentry.”’ So the
verdict was rendered that Virginia was settled by mer-
chants, shipping people, yeomen, indentured servants, and
slaves. But those who climbed upward into the possession
of great plantations quickly assumed the cultural guise of
the English aristocracy in that flexible fashion so charac-
teristic of all mankind.

For the social order of the middle colonies a mixture of
land and trade gave the economic basis. In Pennsylvania,
rich merchants usually carried off the emoluments and the
honors, political and cultural. In New York, patroons and
mercantile families of Dutch origin retained their high place
in society when the English took over their inheritance but
in time new houses ruled by the conquerors rose beside
Dutch establishments in town and country. Trade and land
furnished the military, political, and social leaders of the
province. Indeed, the dominant gentry of New York re-
sembled the Whig lords of England who united landed
property with fortunes invested in business and they were
in some cases connected by ties of marriage with the English
nobility. Staats Long Morris, the elder brother of
Gouverneur, for example, rose to the post of major in
the British army, married the Duchess of Gordon, and

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 129

remained loyal to King George to the end of his ,days.
If the Delanceys were not equal to the Newcastles in
wealth and finesse, they were at least competent to manage
political spoils of no mean proportions.

Even the pocket boroughs of old England had copies on
the banks of the Hudson; some of the lordly masters of
New York manors were represented in the provincial legis-
lature by delegates of their own choosing—with the assent
of their tenants a matter of form. From mansions that
were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk
Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric,
relying on numerous kinsmen, armed negro slaves, trained
bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread
Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and
plain.

In all the colonies the ruling orders, in English fashion,
demanded from the masses the obedience to which they
considered themselves entitled by wealth, talents, and gen-
eral preéminence. At Harvard and Yale, authority, houses,
lands, and chattels determined the rank of students in the
academic roll. In churches, Puritan and Anglican alike,
congregations were seated according to age, social position,
and estate. One old Virginia family displayed its regard
for the commoners of the vicinity every Sunday by requiring
them to wait outside the church until the superiors were
duly seated in the large pew especially provided for them.
A member of another proud family of the Old Dominion
kept the vulgar in their place with such severity while she
lived that she felt some atonement necessary in death; so
she ordered her body buried under the pavement in that
section of the church reserved for the poor—as an act of
abasement and reparation. Even the Anglican clergy of
the South were sometimes assigned to a lowly rank.
When, for example, a parson of quality sought the hand
of Governor Spottswood’s widow, her family opposed the
marriage with a painstaking argument designed to demon-
strate the social inferiority of the position occupied by the

130 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

man of God. In New England, of course, no such indig-
nity could be heaped on the head of the preacher. There
he had the choice of the ladies and he could play the réle
of a pope to powerful merchants; but in Massachusetts
during the later colonial decades his power so waned that
he did not venture to interfere with the serious business of
whaling, trafficking, and slaving.

§

Next in order under the dominant families were the
farmers—yeomen, as they were called in England—owners
of small freeholds as distinguished from the gentry of large
estates. ‘hey formed the bulk of the population in New
England and the middle colonies and they peopled the back
country of the Southern provinces. In the North they fur-
nished most of the versatile Yankees, jacks of all trades,
who sailed ships and carried notions to the four quarters
of the world, when they were not working with their wives
and children in the field, at the loom, or in the dye house.
On the Southern seaboard, as we have seen, they founded
many of the landed families who in later days boasted of
Cavalier ancestors. ‘Toward the frontier, especially from
Virginia downward, the yeomanry was recruited to some
extent from the ranks of the more fortunate indentured
servants who found it possible to rise in a land of such
opportunities when their term of service was over.

However diverse its origin, this large body of freeholders
was composed of industrious..and~ambitious~men and
women. They were often illiterate, often housed in
wretched huts, and often spurned by the upper classes but
all through the colonial years they continued to fight their ~
way upward from poverty in a determined quest for com-
fort, security, and influence. Aided by abundant natural
resources, they rose higher and faster in the New World
than in the Old, by that process preparing the way for the
revolution in America.

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 131

Everywhere the men of this class, enjoying as landown- \
ers the right to vote, furnished the numerical majority of
the popular party that resisted the pretensions of the Eng- -),
lish government and its American agents. Ifthe merchants —
and riotous mechanics of the towns unwittingly started the
war which led to independence, it was the farmers who
supplied the drive that carried it through and who shed
most of the blood spilled in the contest. If a Virginia gen-
tleman of high position commanded the army, it was yeo-
men fresh from the plow who filled the ranks and carried
the muskets. They were to be heard from in the days
which followed the overthrow of British dominion in |
America, protesting against the rule of native merchants,
financiers, and planters.

The third layer of the social order was composed of free
artisans and laborers. Within the boundaries of each city
was a body of independent workmen large enough, as we
have seen, to give occasional alarms to timid merchants and
to foreshadow troubles ahead, but the growth of this class ”
in numbers and power was slow. Only those who managed
to accumulate a little property were allowed to vote; and
everywhere the brand of inferiority was stamped upon
them. When the son of a Boston bricklayer was elevated
to the office of justice of the peace in 1759, his right to the
office was attacked on the ground of his low social origins;
and his defense was not the dignity of his calling but a
reply that the charge was false. ‘‘A poor man,” lamented
a colonial democrat of Philadelphia in the spring of 1776,
“has rarely the honor of speaking to a gentleman on any
terms and never with any familiarity but for a few weeks
before the election. How many poor men, common men,
and mechanics have been made happy within this fortnight
by a shake of the hand, a pleasing smile, and little familiar
chat with gentlemen who have not for these seven years
past condescended to look at them. Blessed state which
brings all so nearly on a level. . . . Be freemen then and
you will be companions for gentlemen annually.”

132 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The hope of the laboring classes, thus buoyantly ex-
pressed, was generous, but the handicap of their economic
status was not to be quickly overcome by any mere effort
of the imagination. Even after the declaration of inde-
pendence their position was not elevated in the eyes of
ruling persons by the profession of radical doctrines. ‘‘It
is of no consequence,” coldly remarked John Adams in the
Continental Congress in 1777, “by what name you call the
people, whether by that of freemen or slaves; in some
countries the laboring poor are called freemen, in others
they are called slaves; but the difference as to the state is
imaginary only. What matters it whether a landlord em-
ploying ten laborers on his farm gives them annually as
much money as will buy them the necessaries of life or gives
them those necessities at short hand? . . . The condition
of the laboring poor in most countries—that of the fisher-
men particularly of the Northern states—is as abject as
that of slavery.”

§

Below the level of freedom were the indentured servants
employed usually in agriculture or menial work. Alto-
gether these temporary bondmen made up a large propor-
tion of the population, especially in the regions south of
New York. It is true that, on the expiration of their terms
of bondage, such servants passed into the class of freemen
and that many acquired property and position in time; but
their ranks were constantly recruited by newcomers from
England and from the Continent and a large percentage
never rose above the level of casual laborers after they
served out their indenture. If no legal disability separated
them from the main body of the population when their lib-
erty was attained, the badge of their servile experience usu-
ally hung heavily around their necks. At all events, in the
South, where they were despised by masters and slaves
alike, they formed great settlements of “poor. whites” that
lay like a blight upon the land.

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 133

At the bottom of the social scale were the chattel slaves,
more than half a million in number when the war for inde-
pendence commenced. ‘Though manumission was possible
in some colonies, the law held most of the slaves in perma-
nent servitude and, whether free or bond, their color
marked them off from the other classes of every rank. In
economic status, slaves who were fortunate in their masters
often had a position superior to that of poor whites and
unhappy indentured servants; but under the best of con-~
ditions they were silent members of the social order, liable
to punishment for the slightest disobedience and to terrible
penalties for serious crimes. ‘They served as the foundation
of the planting aristocracy in the South and labored as the
servants of the mercantile class in all sections. Voiceless
themselves, they found but few spokesmen in the white
race. It was with extreme caution that John Woolman
composed, in 1746, Part I of his pamphlet entitled Consid-
erations on the Keeping of Negroes in which he argued
that they were ‘‘of the same species with ourselves,” en-
dowed with natural rights, and held in bondage on grounds
neither righteous nor holy.

§

Like so many elements of the English class structure, the
English family system, with its traditions reaching back
to the dawn of history and its deep entanglements in prop-
erty and the struggle for existence, was transported to the
American colonies. According to the well-accepted prin-
ciples of the common law, the husband and father was
lord and master of the family establishment, although in
practice his sovereignty was often nominal enough. In this
arrangement, the wife and mother—the married woman—
found her personality merged in that of her husband, her
legal existence suspended if not quite extinguished, and
numerous disabilities imposed upon her.

On the day of her wedding her lands and houses, in case

ae

134 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

she had any such property, passed to the control of her
husband unless reserved to her by a solemn pre-nuptial con-
tract. The husband could take and use the rents and profits
for his own ends; he could dispose of her interests without
her consent; if he committed waste, she had no action
against him; if he ran into debt, the estate could be sold
for the benefit of his creditors. The woman’s personal
property—money, notes, bonds, jewels, and movables in
general—became also her husband’s to hold, use, sell,
assign, or consume at his pleasure. ‘‘So great a favorite,”
wrote the learned and genial Blackstone, “‘is the female sex
of the laws of England.” So thoroughly were these high
doctrines incorporated into American colonial law that two
hundred years after the landing of the Pilgrims the Amer-
ican jurist and commentator, James Kent, had only to enu-
merate them and add a few slight variations to portray the
legal rules of domestic relations then in force in the United
States. Akin to the command of the husband over his wife
was the authority of the father over his children, a strict
control over the labor and services of his sons and daugh-
ters until they reached maturity, subject to little or no in-
terference from the state.

Coupled with these privileges and preéminences, how-
ever, were many duties specified in the law of the family.
The head of the house had to discharge his wife’s debts
incurred either before marriage or during wedded life for
the ordinary purchase of goods. He was bound to main-
tain her by supplying the comforts and necessaries appro-
priate to his fortune and condition. He was liable for
torts and frauds committed by his wife; where imprison-
ment was the penalty imposed he could be sent to jail for
her misdeeds. Moreover, he was required to support his
children until they became of age, if the state of his income
admitted; and under the laws of some colonies he was or-
dered to give them the rudiments of education. As a mat-
ter of fact, the Massachusetts act establishing a limited
compulsory education may be regarded as the entering

—————————”—C CC

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 135

wedge by which the community finally broke the almost
absolute authority of parents.

Another ancient family institution imported into
America by the English was the custom of regulating the
transmission of landed property with a view to holding
wealthy houses intact. To that end, two capital principles
were especially adapted: the law of entail made it impos-
sible for the owner of land to sell or give away his estate
and the rule of primogeniture provided that, in the absence
of a will to the contrary, ‘“‘where there are two or more
males in equal degree, the eldest shall inherit; but the fe-
males altogether.”’ The predominance of the eldest male,
based upon the economy and government of a feudal so-
ciety, prevailed in eight of the thirteen colonies.

In the South, from Virginia to Georgia, primogeniture
was accepted as a matter of course, for it guaranteed to
planting families a certain continuity in the possession of
their fortunes; and the practice of entailing estates also
extended throughout that region, excepting South Carolina,
where the custom had been forbidden by law. With a high
degree of consistency, New York and New Jersey, as royal
provinces, adhered both to primogeniture and entails, and,
for that matter, so did Rhode Island save for a few years
in its checkered career. Although the spokesmen of the
yeomanry and the merchants often railed against such in-
stitutions, they were unable to destroy these vestiges of
feudalism. Even in New England, where the leveling
spirit of the freeholder was strong and where legislation
was enacted favoring equality among children in general,
including girls with boys, provision was made for giving
the eldest son a double portion of the inheritance.

In accordance with kindred traditions, parents played a
large role in the negotiation of marriages, especially those
endowed with earthly goods—always with a sharp eye to
preserving the family status. Landed gentlemen of the
South, as in old England, looked for happy matches that
might swell their fortunes and elevate their position. Puri-

136 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tans, emphasizing the civil character of marriage rather
than religious sanctions, were equally sagacious in effecting
jointures; the custom of seeking ‘“‘good providers” and
daughters and widows “well placed’”’ was as firmly fixed
in Massachusetts as the common law itself. Among ac-
counts of the high and the low, amusing illustrations of the
practice appeared—in Judge Sewall’s diary, in advertise-
ments, in Franklin’s lampoons, for example. Whenever a
lucky bargain was struck, the newspapers caught up the
glad refrain. On one occasion a colonial editor announced
that a happy groom had wed ‘‘a most amiable young lady
with £10,000 to her fortune,”’ filling in the details for the
public.

The integrity of the family institution was generally pro-
tected by laws against carnality. “Teachings of the church
fathers on the wickedness of human nature, consecrated by
centuries of Catholic propaganda and taken literally by
Puritan and Anglican, were made, like due process, the law
of the land in their new home. Fines, public confessions,
brands, or lashings were usually prescribed for the in-
continent and the records seem to indicate that, as a rule,
it was the woman, not the man, who got the heavier pun-
ishment—a practice defended on the ground that her of-
fenses might corrupt the family strain. Originally Con-
necticut and Massachusetts made adultery a capital crime,
but in 1673 the former colony substituted branding for the
death penalty and about twenty years afterward the latter
adopted in its place a law requiring guilty persons to wear
the scarlet letter—a milder rule borrowed from Plymouth.
Respecting all the cardinal points of waywardness and all
lapses from reputability, the canons of Virginia were as
savage as those of Massachusetts.

As is generally the case, the eye of the law was every-
where quickest in discovering the shortcomings of the lowly.
The lot of the indentured girl, for instance, was especially
hard; if she fell from community grace and brought a child
into the world out of wedlock, she was given an extra year

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 137

or more of bondage, while the father of the child, if the
master, usually got off with some trivial penalty imposed
by the court of his peers. Even for their frivolities the
women of New England were roundly scored in sermons.
‘At the resurrection of the just,’’ exclaimed a divine, ‘“‘there
will be no such sight to be met as Angels carrying painted
ladies in their arms.”

In spite of the tenacity of inherited English custom, the
relative religious freedom and the economic oppor:
tunities of the New World worked radical changes in the
spirit of the family institution. The Puritans of Massachu-
setts were in open revolt against Catholic and Anglican
doctrines with respect to matrimony and, in keeping with
their professions, they made marriage a civil institution,
taking it out of the hands of the clergy, but in 1692
they were compelled by the Crown to accept the ecclesiasti-
cal ceremony as of equal validity. Fully aware that the law
of England which controlled their charter provided that
weddings should be solemnized by ministers, they effected
their departure by practice long before they ventured to
sanction it by statute in defiance of the mother country.

Putting aside also the Catholic bar against divorce and
the Anglican modification which permitted separation only
on the ground of adultery, Puritans authorized the dissolu-
tion of the matrimonial tie for various reasons, including
desertion and cruel treatment. Likewise, among the Quak-.
ers marriage became a civil institution requiring for legality
merely pledges of loyalty made in the presence of witnesses,
while divorce was permitted on scriptural grounds. More-
over, even conduct during marriage was to some extent con-
trolled by law in Massachusetts, where the custom of
England which permitted the husband to chastise his wife
was abolished and wife-beating forbidden by statute. Thus
the Puritan woman was protected against a cruel husband
and allowed to escape, if she wished, from his harsh régime.
Only in the colonies where the Anglican party was dominant
did the strict rules of the English law apply to the making

138 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and breaking of marriage bonds—with a tendency, how-
ever, even there in the direction of equality in the validity
of civil and religious celebrations of wedlock.

_- ~The economic conditions of America, as well as religious
ideas, gave direction to the evolution of the family. The
ease with which youths could enter new occupations, such
as merchandising, tavern keeping, fishing, and shipping,
tended to break the rigidity of the family’s class status, per-
mitting rapid movement up and down the scale. Re-
enforcing this process was the abundance of cheap land—
the virgin soil of the frontier that was always beckoning
sons and daughters away from the parental roof, inviting
them to make homesteads of their own in distant places.
Furthermore, as we have already indicated, in five of the
thirteen colonies, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hamp-
shire, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where the rule of pri-
mogeniture did not obtain, inheritances were equally divided
among all the children, saving generally to the eldest male
a double portion. In the dissolution of estates, the first-
born son was dethroned as head of the family and the
ancient pillar of unity thereby destroyed.

Under the pressure of these forces and enlarged oppor-
tunities, bonds of kinship were snapped; branches of fam-
ilies and emancipated individuals scattered themselves
among settlements all the way from New Hampshire to
Georgia; and young men of ability made their way out of
poverty with a speed that kept all society in ferment.
By no social magic could any institution as secure as the
English county family be maintained in America. Even in
Virginia, where the most heroic efforts were made to uphold
class barriers, pushing yeomen were ever breaking into the
older and more seasoned circles; Jefferson, the son of a
back-country farmer, could marry the daughter of a Ran-
dolph. In this fashion the individual in colonial times
began to emerge from the family group, as children com-
menced to cast off the restraints of class and parents in the
choice of mates, occupations, and careers.

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 139
§

Among the ruling orders the manners and diversions of
the colonial age, so closely affliated with domestic institu-
tions, were almost identical with those of the middle classes
of the same type in Great Britain. Historians for the sake
of convenience were wont to speak of Puritan New Eng-
land, the Cavalier South, and the commercial Middle Colo-
nies as representing distinct schemes of culture but the
simplicity of the classification is responsible for many an~
error. If we look at the statute books, which pretend to
universality, it appears that delights of the flesh and skepti-
cism in religion, even the faintest, were condemned with
equal severity in Virginia and Massachusetts. Puritan Bos-
ton gave to mankind one of the greatest freethinkers of
the colonial era, Benjamin Franklin, who was in most mat-
ters, including his relations with women, unconventional
enough for the gay gentlemen who toasted Prince Charlie;
though he fled from Boston to Philadelphia to breathe a
freer air, he was the product of Cotton Mather’s province.

On the other hand, under genial Southern skies, were ~
reared the families that brought forth in America the two
outstanding pietists of the nineteenth century, Robert E.
Lee, whose lips were never profaned by an oath, whiskey,
or tobacco, and Stonewall Jackson, who opened every battle
with a prayer. Rum as hot and wines as rich as any that
graced the planter’s table were found on the boards of the
noblest divines and the strictest merchants of Boston.

Nevertheless, Puritanism threw a dark shadow over
many of the amusements deemed harmless in Virginia. The
strictness of Cromwell’s generation—that excessive reac-
tion to the lewdness and vulgarity of the Elizabethan age—
was reproduced with its Biblical sanctions in New Eng-
land’s legal code. Sabbath was made a solemn day, meet
only for preaching, praying, and Bible reading; all labor,
not strictly vital, and all frivolity were forbidden by law.
Theaters and Maypoles—the latter historic symbols of

140 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

passionate carnality—were frowned upon. Drunkenness,
riotous living, and adultery were regarded with horror by
the elect and penalized by the lawmakers partly on theo-
logical grounds and partly with an eye to industry and
thrift.

And yet, far and wide as Puritanism reached, New Eng-
land was not as deadly uniform as superficial writers
imagine. Before Boston was three generations old, alien
elements broke the severe regimen of the fathers. In spite
of the hostile reception accorded to them Anglicans, Pres-
byterians, and Huguenots insisted on settling down among
the faithful, becoming so strong in numbers and wealth that
the English government wrote into the new charter of
1691 a clause making property, instead of church member-
ship, the test for the suffrage. On the eve of the Revolu-
tion, more than one-third of the rich merchants of Boston
were outside the pale of the Congregational Church, adher-
ing to manners and customs of their own.

In Connecticut, as well as Massachusetts, there were
many good Anglicans who winked at the blue laws and
thought with King Charles II that God would not punish
anyone for taking a few pleasures by the way. Rhode
Island too was a thorn in the side of the righteous in Boston
because it tolerated from the first a laxity in religious
opinion and a personal liberty that violated accepted tradi-
tions. In fact, the descendants of the pioneers who fol-
lowed Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson into the wil-
derness were more active in the manufacture and sale of
rum than in the enforcement of Sabbatarian discipline.
New Hampshire likewise showed strange folkways, espe-
cially after the Scotch-Irish began to pour into the province
and clear the hills of their crowns. In any event, the law
was one thing and its execution another; the clergy and the
politicians could get a penal measure through a legislature
easier than they could carry it into operation.

Notwithstanding strict laws with respect to Sunday ob-
servance and sins of the flesh, there was in the South, above

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 14)

all in Virginia, a joyous, light-hearted, and hilarious mode ~— ‘

of life which offered a strong contrast to the more sober
hues of New England. Over wide areas the tastes and
manners of English landed families were reproduced. Fox
hunting, horse racing, circuses, gambling, cock fighting,
dancing, and drinking contests were among the frequent and
reputable amusements of the time. The economy of the
planting South, like its tradition, was on the side of easier
and merrier ways among the upper classes. ‘There was.
more leisure among masters and mistresses of slaves than
among the farmers and seafaring merchants of New Eng-
land who had to depend on sobriety and industry for their
daily bread. ‘There were great manor houses equipped with
the luxuries that made entertainment a delight: the furnish-
ings, plate, and good wines of the Old World.

As a rule, the planting families were widely separated
on huge manors where routine weighed so heavily on their
lonely hours that every opportunity for a joyful rebound
from the racking tedium of rural life was eagerly seized.
Guests and travelers—especially wayfarers bringing news
from the outside world—were treated like princes, the
revels of gay parties affording an outlet for the pent-up
emotions of dull days. Moreover, in the South Sunday was
Sunday, not the Sabbath of Puritan holiness; if all persons
were supposed to be in their places at the parish church for
the appointed services, the ban on solemnity, according to
Anglican and Catholic custom, was lifted when devotions
were over. The planting section was, therefore, a land
of “good living,” that is, for the owners of large domains,
mansions, and slaves.

From the life of that rich Virginia gentleman, George
Washington, abundant illustrations of this statement can
be taken. Washington loved the best of clothes, super-
fine scarlet cloth, gold lace, ruffled shirts, and silver buckles.
“Whatever goods you may send me,” he wrote to his factor
in London, “‘let them be fashionable.” His taste for good
wines was known far and wide; though temperate for his

142 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

day, he usually took four or five glasses of Madeira for
dinner and finished off with a draught of beer and a small
glass of punch.

A good horseman himself, Washington had a passion
for horse races and indulged it by contributing to racing
purses, entering his own steeds, attending the contests, and
betting cautiously on his favorites. He heartily enjoyed
games of chance; in his diary he often records ‘‘bad weather,
at home all day over cards’; but his bets were never ex-
travagant: the largest winning entered in his account is
three pounds and his largest loss nine pounds and four-
teen shillings—equivalent to three or four hundred dollars
in modern terms. ‘Theaters, circuses, and cock fights had
an irresistible appeal for him. He was at the front at
country balls in his neighborhood, in moderate drinking
bouts at the tavern, and in fox-hunting parties. His own
home was the scene of constant merry-making; in two
months during the year 1768 he entertained at dinner or
had guests for twenty-nine days and dined away from home
on seven, with other diversions in the meantime. Between
his social obligations and the management of his estate,
Washington had little time for literature, even in the days
before heavy duties of state fell to his lot. In the journal
that tells how he spent his hours, he entered in his youth
two notices of works he had read; after that he either
found no book worthy of mention or gave up reading
entirely.

Though the social life of the South was mainly rural,
there were a few.towns where the urbanities flourished.
Charleston, for example, was a center for pleasure-loving
and well-to-do people who came from all directions if only
for the season. Music, art, dramatics, and lectures were
there added to the customary routine of life; from 1737 to
1822 excellent concerts were given under the auspices of
the St. Cecilia Society. No ban was placed upon the
theater and English players as well as local talent amused
or thrilled the social set—ladies no less than gentlemen. At

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 143

Southern ports English men-of-war often lay at anchor for
weeks, when the officers from the vessels added color and
vivacity to parties and ceremonies on shore.

Pennsylvania evolved a third type of manners and cus-
toms. Forbidden by their code to make lavish displays,
loyal members of the Quaker sect upheld the ideal of
simplicity. Though deeply religious like the Puritans, the
Friends believed in perfection more than in sin, in guidance
by the inner light rather than in restraints imposed by the
authority of the clergy and magistracy. ‘Chey frowned as
darkly upon the joys of the flesh, upon music, drama, and
dancing but they did not use as much force in stamping out
such diversions among their wealthy neighbors. Their
creed of the simple life, though often violated by the rich,
notably by the Penns themselves, laid emphasis on equality
rather than on distinction, and in that way put most of the
sect outside the “‘society’’ constructed on the basis of waste
and spending power. Leaning in faith toward philosophic
anarchy, the Quakers were not absorbed in politics as much
as the Puritans of New England or the Anglicans of Vir-

ginia. Relying for support on the teachings of Jesus rather ~~

than on sectarian dogma, their inclinations were toward tol-
erance rather than uniformity, inquiry rather than author-
ity;-charity rather than damnation.

All these circumstances conspired to make Philadelphia
the most tolerant and secular city on the continent. A com-
bination of wealth, philanthropy, and moderation promoted
intellectual activity of a humane and realistic character.
Long before the Italian Beccaria wrote his treatise on the
theory of prison reform, the Quakers had begun the prac-
tice. Philadelphia could with justice claim the first circulat-
ing library, the first medical school and hospital, the first
fire company in America, the earliest municipal improve-
ments, and the first legal journal. It was the scientific
center of the colonies for the study of botany, astronomy,
mathematics, physics, and natural history. It was the home
rightly chosen by Benjamin Franklin when he fled from -

144 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

New England and selected a seat for his publishing busi-
ness, the spot from which went forth his call for the foun-
dation of the American Philosophical Society—the scene of
continuous meetings of scientific and free speculators until
the seizure of the city by the British during the Revolution.
At dinners in fine old mansions or at lively parties in tav-
erns, the merchants and scholars of the city assembled to
discuss everything under the sun. A serious air, though
not Puritan, hung over the place.

Still a fourth type of social life developed in New York,
a colony that was neither Puritan like Massachusetts nor
Quaker like Pennsylvania. ‘Though its ruling order of mer-
chants and landed gentry was mixed, being composed of
English, Dutch, Scotch, and French Huguenots, its social
distinctions seem to have been sharper than in New Eng-
land or the lower Middle colonies. ‘The richest families
spent their winters in New York City, where amusements of
various kinds from the theater to bull-baiting were fur-
nished for their diversion, and they lived during the sum-
mers on their estates up the Hudson or on Long Island.
In general, the upper classes of the province were freer
from religious inhibitions on pleasure and less given to
philosophic speculation than their Puritan neighbors and
less scientific in their interests than the intellectuals of Phil-
adelphia. While the Anglican church was established in >
the colony by law, not one-tenth of the people belonged to
that communion or paid any attention to its ministrations.
Dissent rather than conformity of any type was the note
of the province. So there was a wide liberty of opinion for
all except Catholics but it was apparently the liberty of
indifference, not of reasoned toleration or skepticism.
Taking colonial America as a whole, therefore, it is evi-
dent that, in spite of certain similarities, there was a
broad diversity in manners and customs. All the eighteenth
century tourists from foreign countries were struck by that
fact, by the “‘strange mingling of the uncouth, the totally
wild, and the highly civilized and cultured.” They were

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 145

impressed by the charm of Southern ladies, the number of
excellent French books in the libraries of the planters, the
elegant plate on the tables of Philadelphia and Boston mer-
chants, the everlasting curiosity and questioning of the rural
Yankee, the bustling enterprise of the ports, the forward-
ness of the laboring people, and the range of the intellectual
interests.

If the travelers saw Jonathan Edwards shaking all New
England over the roaring flames of hell in 1743, they also
heard Benjamin Franklin exclaiming that “‘the first drudg-
ery of settling new colonies being ‘pretty well over,’ Amer-
icans ought to do their part in scientific and philosophic
inquiry.” If they discovered any qualities which could be
called distinctly American, they likewise found antagonisms
of the most pronounced character. ‘‘Fire and water,”
wrote Burnaby, in 1760, after traveling more than a thou-
sand miles in the colonies, “are not more heterogeneous
than the different colonies in North America.” The com-
fort of the free masses in contrast with the awful beggary
of Europe and the sadness of slavery impressed every
voyager. “In the course of 1200 miles,” said Burnaby, “‘I
did not see a single object that solicited charity. . . . The
condition of the slaves is pitiable; their labor excessively
hard, their diet poor and scanty, their treatment cruel and
oppressive.”

§

The intellectual life of the colonies, like their hierarchy -
of classes, their social tastes, and their domestic institu-
tions, sprang from the British heritage of the seventeenth
century, developed under the influence of local circum-
stances, and was modified by the currents of new opinion
from the Old World that from time to time touched their
shores. Inevitably the dominant interest in the beginning
was theology. From the break-up of the Roman Empire
to the beginning of the colonial era, the clergy had been
the leaders in thought and instruction. Asa rule they were

146 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the makers of books, the teachers in schools and univer-
sities, the compilers of laws, the guardians of all things of
the spirit. ?

When John Smith sailed away to Virginia from England,
the clergy still ruled intellectual life all over Europe. Sec-
ular learning, books on travel, reprints of the classics, and
treatises on law were no doubt gaining on theological tomes
but the monopoly of the clergy over formal learning was
unbroken. ‘The Protestant revolt had come; reformers of
the Anglican church—Latimer, Ridley, Hooper, Jewel, and
Grindal, some of them martyrs—had assailed the pope,
episcopal vestments, high altars, and other symbols of
Rome as the trappings of superstition, but with the zeal of
the early church fathers they, too, had resorted to the logic
and rhetoric of theology for their arguments and kept their
minds subdued to that great branch of learning, even when
they appealed to reason for support. Puritan divines had
attacked the Church of Ridley and Hooper as still savoring
too much of things Roman, but they also spoke the language
of theology, no matter whether they discussed the salva-
tion of souls or the affairs of the body politic. The Sepa-
ratists who in turn broke from the Puritans did not depart
from religious sources in their search for words and ideas
to justify the faith that was in them and the conduct that
pleased them. Neither did the clergy who spoke for the
Presbyterians, Huguenots, Lutherans, Dutch Reformers,
Moravians, and other sects that scattered their congrega-
tions from New Hampshire to Georgia. Everywhere, ex-
cept among the Quakers, who had no clerical estate, preach-
ers, with their passionate interest in dogma, in theology,
and in dominion over the minds of laymen, stood at the
gates of knowledge with flaming swords.

Following the tradition of sixteen hundred years in the
Old World, the Puritan divines of New England took to
the printed word with holy fervor, filling yards of shelves
with volumes, tracts, and pamphlets. ‘They wrote heavy
treatises on The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 147

and brochures on Eternal Damnation and the Punishment
of Sinners. Even secular matters, such as wars and ship-
wrecks, were viewed in the light of divine purpose. In a
booklet on troubles with the Indians, a learned author re-
vealed the spirit and method of his craft by adding the
subtitle: ““Wherein the frequent Conspiracies of the Indians
to cut off the English and the wonderful providence of God
in disappointing their devices, is declared.” The difficult
issue of demonology was covered under an ample head:
‘Cases of Conscience Concerning evil Spirits Personating
Men, Witchcrafts, Infallible proofs of Guilt in such as
accused with that Crime. All Considered according to the
Scriptures, History, Experience and the Judgment of Many
Learned Men.” Such were the great themes that occupied
the most powerful minds of New England in the age of
clericalism.

Among the towering theologians of America two stood
out as veritable Titans: Cotton Mather, the scholar, and
Jonathan Edwards, evangelist and thinker. The first of
these, a son of Increase Mather, the thundering clergyman
who tried to fasten the church on the state in Massachusetts
and then to make the established clergy the masters of the
church, was born and reared in Boston. By tireless labor
Cotton Mather amassed a prodigious quantity of knowl-
edge mixed with the curious delusions and amazing credu-
lities of his time. He studied Hebrew as well as Greek
and Latin, explored the mysteries of theology, dabbled in
the secular learning of the ancients, and took an interest in
English grammar just separating from the Latin, in mis-
‘sions to the Indians, and in inoculation for smallpox, which
was then a burning issue. He wrote huge volumes on re-
ligious questions—roads to salvation and ways to hell. He
rolled from the press innumerable pamphlets on every con-
ceivable point of theological interest and made pretensions
to authority worthy of a Tudor or a Bourbon. His style, “
like his manner of speaking, as a contemporary remarked,
‘“‘was very emphatical.”’

148 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Across the border in Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards, a
son of Yale, rose high in the theological firmament just
after Cotton Mather’s star sank on the horizon. Mather
died in 1728; Edwards was born in 1703 and reached the
summit of his power as the colonial age was drawing to
its close. ‘The Connecticut divine combined a passionate
evangelical temper with sober thinking on recondite ques-
tions of human destiny. Sinners he scourged with awful
fury: ‘The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much
as anyone holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over
the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath
towards you burns like fire.”

With such assurance and violence did Edwards preach
this gospel that his labors bore fruit in weeping, wailing,
and sudden repentance among his horrified auditors, culmi-
nating at length in a tumultuous frenzy, known as the
“Great Awakening,” that ran over New England like wild-
fire, spread into the other colonies, and finally expired in a
spasm of exhaustion. No excesses alarmed him; no failures
damped his ardor. He devoutly believed that the discovery
of America was the work of Providence, that the village
in which he preached was the special object of God’s atten-
tion, and that he himself was called from on high to begin
the renovation of the earth.

Some of Edwards’ ambitions were unfulfilled but his
occult writings translated into several foreign tongues ex-
cited the enthusiasm and admiration of Protestant theolo-
gians in the far corners of the earth; Holland preachers
read Edwards in Dutch; in Beirut his volumes appeared in
Arabic. John Wesley, the English evangelist who was des-
tined to succeed Edwards as a theological crusader, drew
inspiration from his life and sermons. Fichte, the German
philosopher, called him ‘‘the most original thinker in Amer-
ica.” ‘Those in a position to judge tell us that his discus-
sion of free will in his dissertation on the origin of sin
is among the great classics of the pre-scientific age. ‘‘The
only relief I had was to forget it,” remarked the droll

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 149

Boswell, commenting on Edwardian doctrine in a conversa-
tion with Doctor Johnson. iB
With the spread of printing, the theories of theology,
sometimes in curious shapes, ran as current coin among the
masses, especially in New England, where even the thun-
dering Mathers could not awe the pews into silence. In
fact, the Puritans, men and women alike, went to church
with notebook in hand, followed the argument of the
preacher with the closest attention, studied it zealously dur-
ing the week, and discussed it minutely at the regular
open forum held for that purpose. ‘They were not monks
trying to find out how many angels could stand on the point
of a needle; they were plain citizens, whole communities
indeed, soberly debating solemn questions of faith and
conduct: ‘‘Can there be an indwelling of the Holy Ghost
in a believer without a personal union? Is it lawful to have
dealings with idolators like the French? Should women

wear veils?”

To lectures on fine points of personal salvation they were
especially devoted. A young lady, whose hand Judge Sewall
was seeking, rejected him because she was so engrossed in
theological debates that she could not consider matrimony;
she would not give up this favorite diversion though he
presented her with gifts of books on religious questions and
supplemented them with glazed almonds, meers cake, and a
quire of paper. In fact, the magistrates of Massachusetts
had to reduce the number of religious lectures in order to
give laymen more time for business and labor.

In their feverish search for the origin of evil, their
continuous output of scholastic literature, their interminable
debates on obscure points of theology, and their occasional
outbursts of religious frenzy, colonial Americans were
merely operating on the mental plane of their European
contemporaries. Even the witchcraft hysteria of Massa-
chusetts, one phase of religious experience, was sanctioned
by laws and practices already hoary with ten thousand years
when the Mayflower dropped her anchor off Cape Cod.

150 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The Bible in many passages lent its authority to the idea
of witchcraft. ‘Philosophers and physicians, popes, prel-
ates, divines, statesmen, judges, and monarchs’’—the wise,
the learned, the high, and the good—had from time im-
memorial profoundly believed in it, and approved the exe-
cution of persons charged with that enormity, often invok-
ing the science of demonology to destroy their enemies.

The very decade that saw the founding of Jamestown
also witnessed a new act of the English Parliament laying
the penalty of death on persons guilty of witchcraft, sor-
cery, charm, enchantment, and such “‘infernal arts’’; and
nearly a hundred years after the Salem craze the sober
Blackstone declared that to deny witchcraft and sorcery
was to fly in the face of the Bible and experience. It was
in the light of ‘‘the wisdom of the ages”’ that the citizens
of Salem made their own adventure in demonology in 1692.

In these circumstances it is not the atrocities committed
by the witch hunters but their moderation that surprises
descendants of the Puritans: the fit was localized and
its term was brief, the killing time lasting only about four
months. ‘The number of victims was relatively small:
twenty persons were put to death by hanging, fifty who
confessed were set free, one hundred and fifty lay in prison
when the tempest blew over, and two hundred more were
under accusation. Massachusetts judges were no doubt
severe but so was Henry VIII; so was Calvin; so was the
Spanish Inquisition. ‘The age was cruel in its persecuting
spirit everywhere, but it may be said for the witch hunters
of New England that most of them became convinced of
their error, offered expiation in the form of public mourn-
ing, and gave relief to the families of their victims—a de-
gree of abasement and apology for folly not often found
in the annals of those who hang and burn the prey of their
opinions and delusions.

In reality, therefore, witchcraft in New England was
merely one of the scenes in the passing of demonology from
the western world. Twenty years after Salem recovered

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 151

from her spasm, England convicted a witch in solemn trial;
sixty years later the Holy Inquisition at Seville ordered a
woman burned for practising the black arts; and in 1793
a public execution for that offense was carried out in
Germany.

§

Theologians of every sect, school, and persuasion, in
struggling to maintain their empire over the intellect of
the modern world, were fighting a losing battle against fate.
In the colonial age, between the founding of Jamestown
and the Declaration of Independence, that is, between 1607 -
and 1776, there was taking place throughout western civ-
ilization a radical upheaval in the affairs and thought of
mankind. The discovery and exploitation of the New
World, with its luxuriant natural resources, multiplied the
numbers and piled higher the riches of the bourgeoisie, a
class which was in conduct and interest, whatever its pro-
fessions of faith, primarily secular.

The same fruitful economic development, that gave thou-
sands of starving European peasants prosperity in America
and poured treasures of specie and goods into the markets
of the world, opened up before the submerged masses of
England and the Continent for the first time in their long
history the possibility of attaining for themselves some-
thing beyond a bare pittance—some of the certainty, some
of the pleasures and luxuries that had been enjoyed only by
lords, merchants, and bishops. No philosophy of innate
sin, of a baffled life, no promise of transports in heaven
could stem the great desire of multitudes for the delights —
of this life enjoyed by their superiors—and all these striv-
ings were secular in spirit and outcome.

Closely affliated with this movement were the rise and
flowering of natural science, free thought, both as an in-
strument of inquiry into the nature of mind and matter and
as a servant of earthly utility. In 1620, the year in which
the Pilgrims began to wrestle with the stubborn soil at

152 THE RISE’ OF AMERICAN. CIVILIZATION

Plymouth, Sir Francis Bacon gave to the world his Novum
Organum, the second part of his Advancement of Learning,
in which he set forth—not for the first time, but with im-
pressive eloquence—the revolutionary doctrine that man
could master nature. by observation and experimentation
and that the conquest of nature was more important than
proficiency in the speculations of the schoolmen. As he
said, he cast the light of induction into the obscurity of
philosophy, a light that would shine long afterward on
the erection of palaces, theaters, and bridges, the construc-
tion of roads and canals, the foundation of schools for the
education of youth, and the enactment of laws for the
improvement of mankind. The tocsin of a new day was
rung. )

Bacon had hardly passed from the scene when John Mil-
ton, in majestic prose, proclaimed freedom of thought and
the press as the ideal for all coming ages—emancipation of
learning from the clerical censor. ‘‘To the pure all things
are pure. . . . Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently
the books if the will and conscience be not defiled. . . . All
opinions, yea, errors known, read and collated, are of main
service and assistance toward speedy attainment of what
is truest... .. To prevent men thinking and acting for
themselves, by restraints on the press, is like to the exploits
of that gallant man who thought to pound up crows by
shutting his park gate. . . . A forbidden writing is thought
to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the face of
them that seek to tread it out. . . . Give me the liberty to
know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience
above all other liberties.” Such was the novel argument
uttered by a Puritan statesman nearly one hundred years
before the birth of Thomas Jefferson.

In the spirit of Bacon and Milton, even though usually
independent, a score of scientists in England and on the
Continent enriched the seventeenth century with intellectual
achievements of the first magnitude. Descartes, French
iconoclastic philosopher, with amazing effects labored at

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 153

his chosen task of clearing the mind of scholastic accumu-
lations, breaking the power of authority over reason, and
widening knowledge in mathematics, physics, and psy-
chology. Four years before the death of Descartes in 1650,
there was born, in Germany, Leibnitz, one of the prime
thinkers of all times, who enlarged exact knowledge in
many fields, encouraged original research, and bent natural
science to the service of human welfare. In medicine, start-
ling adventures were announced by indefatigable workers:
in 1628 Harvey, a Cambridge graduate and physician to
the king, published his thesis on the circulation of the
blood; before the end of that century a great Italian doctor,
Malpighi, had laid the foundations of microscopic anatomy.
Even the starry heavens were now being scanned in the
interest of understanding rather than of fortune-telling.
In splendid succession, da Vinci, Copernicus, Kepler, and
Galileo threw their powerful rays further and further into
the limitless spaces of the skies. And then in the very age
when Cotton Mather was composing sermons on sin, death,
and hell, Sir Isaac Newton was expounding a theory of
gravitation for the planets swinging in their orbits, freeing
astronomy from the long-enduring sway of sorcery and
divination.

Among the throngs who witnessed the funeral of New-
ton in 1727 was a young Frenchman destined to be high
commander in the army of sappers and miners who over-
threw the monarchy and clergy of France at the close of
that century. His name was Voltaire. He had been driven
from his own land for an attack on the government and
while in exile he wrote letters on the English, portraying
the religious and political liberty of England, such as it was,
against the dark background of intolerance and despotism
in France. For half a century more he turned out, in a
continuous stream, histories, plays, novels, letters, and ar-
ticles exalting reason, praising bourgeois comfort, and ridi-
culing the dogmas and officials of the Catholic church. At
the very end of his days, he greeted Benjamin Franklin,

154 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

minister of the American Republic to the Court of Louis
XVI, a skeptic from the New World in whom the spirit
of liberty likewise fiercely burned. Around Voltaire was
grouped an extraordinary body of writers—Diderot,
D’Alembert, Condorcet, amid the host—who worked with
tireless energy exploring all corners of knowledge and
waging war on scholasticism and clerical dominion. Some-
what apart but still one of the great agitators of the eight-
eenth century was Montesquieu, whose work on the Spirit
of the Laws became a text for American political thinkers
and writers. ,
§

The advancement of these new types of secular learning
which extended inquiry into the causes of phenomena—from
the decay of meat to the composition of the stars—unlike
the mastery of theology, could not be effected by a single
mind in a monastic cell or a Protestant library. It called
for codperation among numerous workers, for telescopes,
laboratories, and mathematical instruments of many kinds.
Barely was the need discovered when efforts were made to
meet it. In England a center for the promotion of scientific
activities was created by the foundation of the Royal So-
ciety in 1660; the very next year it appointed a committee
to consider ‘“‘questions to be inquired of in the remotest
parts of the earth’; it encouraged research, issued publica-
tions, and formed ties among men of scientific temper as
far apart as Virginia and Prussia.

Under the patronage of Louis XIV’s great minister, Col-
bert, the new republic of learning was widened by the or-
ganization of the French Academy of Sciences. Already
Austria had an institution for promoting study of the curi-
osities of nature, and by the end of the seventeenth century
a similar society, inspired by Leibnitz, made its début at
Berlin, preparing the way for the Academy of Sciences and
Letters later endowed by Frederick the Great. Under
royal and private patronage, men of scientific interests were

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 155

given money and leisure for travel and research, books and
instruments were assembled for advanced students, bo-
tanical, geological and zodlogical collections were started,
and the knowledge attained by inquiry was disseminated
among the intelligent and curious of all countries. With
the aid of the printing press, the sifted wisdom of the
world was made available even to pioneers on the edge of
English civilization in America; what it lacked in speed
was made up by private correspondence.

Amid this feverish activity in secular learning old
branches of knowledge appeared in novel form and new
branches emerged from the mass of data as generalizations
were made. Mathematics, raised to a high pitch by the
Greeks and Arabs, was now pushed still higher by Des-
cartes. The various divisions of natural science known
to-day—physics, chemistry, geology, and botany—began to
claim the life-long devotion of specialists and before the
eighteenth century had drawn to a close each of these
branches had at hand a goodly array of materials, discov-
eries, and hypotheses. In the same movement of intel-
lectual forces, social studies assumed a more scientific or
realistic form. History, which since the decline of Rome
had been restricted mainly to monastic chronicles of events,
began to appear in the guise of long political disquisitions ;
and finally, under the leadership of the versatile Voltaire,
the first of the modern social historians, students of the past
commenced to survey the manners and customs of peoples
as well as the doings of kings, priests, parliaments, and
warriors. Works on economics and politics, usually thrown
off in the heat of parliamentary disputes, naturally wore the
mask of controversy; and yet in spite of their contentious
origin they took on more and more the spirit of science
as the eighteenth century advanced.

Echoes of this European development which made in-
roads upon the theological monopoly, exalted science, and
gave increasing significance to secular affairs, including the
practical arts, naturally spread out to all continents, beat-

156 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ing even upon the shores of Japan through the gate kept
open at Deshima by the Dutch. Inevitably the American
colonies, as a part of the European system, felt the impact
of the new forces, especially after.the first crude days of
settlement had passed and growing wealth and leisure gave
opportunity and time for study and inquiry. Although
they contributed no Descartes or Newton or Leibnitz to
the world of learning and speculation, the colonies were
from the first hospitable to the spirit of science.

Indeed, there is a tradition to the effect that the men
who founded the Royal Society in England first contem-
plated migration to the New World. According to that
story, they planned to establish their association ‘“‘for pro-
moting natural knowledge” in Connecticut, under the presi-
dency of John Winthrop, and only desisted at the request
of King Charles. At any rate they made Winthrop, who
was in London helping to promote their project, ‘‘chief
correspondent”’ of the new academy “‘in the West.” From
that time forward Americans were enrolled in the Royal
Society as members and contributed specimens, papers, re-
ports, and data for its deliberations and collections. Paul
Dudley of Massachusetts prepared noteworthy pages for
its philosophical transactions. Even the theologians of
New England were stirred by the movement. Increase
Mather formed a club of scholars in Boston to pursue
studies in natural history. Jared Eliot, “‘a preacher, phy-
sician, naturalist, and farmer,’’ of Connecticut, made re-
searches in agriculture and published in 1748 a significant
work on field husbandry.

South as well as North, inquirers now prosecuted scien-
tific studies with zeal and intelligence. In Virginia, John
Banister made. an exhaustive study of local plant life,
which was published in the second volume of a great work
by John Ray, the English naturalist, and was preparing a
natural history of Virginia when death, in 1693, cut off his
useful life. Another Virginian, Mark Catesby, in a com-
prehensive study of natural objects, covered not only his

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 157

native province, but the Carolinas, Florida, and the Ba-
hamas, spending sixteen years, between 1710 and 1726, in
the self-imposed task. His successors in the field, John
Clayton and John Mitchell, both Virginia physicians and
botanists, were members of the Royal Society, wrote papers
for its transactions, and corresponded with scientists and
scientific societies in various parts of the Old World. Clay-
ton was in communication with the great Linneus of
Sweden and sent valuable reports to London colleagues.

The milder theological climate of Pennsylvania and the’
stimulus of the cosmopolitan center of Philadelphia were
especially favorable to the flowering of the scientific spirit.
In 1743 Franklin, himself a member of the Royal Society,
announced that the time had come to form an American
Academy; in a pamphlet on the subject he argued that,
notwithstanding the handicaps imposed by the drudgery of
settling a new country, something might be done for the
advancement of science in America by cooperative efforts.
The next year his project—the offspring of a literary and
scientific club called the Junto, founded by Franklin in
1727—-was started in a modest way; later it was reorgan-
ized; and in 1769 as the American Philosophical Society
it was launched upon its long and distinguished career.

The purpose of the Society was the promotion of the
applied sciences and practical arts and the encouragement
of “all philosophical experiments that let light into the
nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over
matter, and multiply the conveniences and pleasures of life.”’
Its membership included virtually all the leading represen-
tatives of secular learning in the colonies and many eminent
scientists of the Old World, for example, Buffon, Lin-
neus, Condorcet, Raynal, and Lavoisier. To make ac-
cessible to its members the pertinent researches of scholars,
the Society developed, under Franklin’s direction and on
the basis of his gifts, a library composed of the latest Euro-
pean works of a scientific and practical character, which
formed a strange contrast to the theological tomes of the

158 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

colonial colleges. It began important collections in the
various branches of ‘“‘natural history,’ held conferences at
which learned papers were presented and discussed, inspired
the formation of local societies and museums, and has con-
tinued its significant career, unbroken, until the present day.
Several members of Franklin’s circle won more than local

honors as thinkers and investigators. Dr. Benjamin Rush
made himself one of the few great mathematicians of his
age and wrote important works on medicine besides; in
1773 he presented to the Philosophical Society an “Inquiry
into- Dreams and Sleep.”’ David Rittenhouse contributed
to the development of the thermometer, the compensating
pendulum, and several mathematical instruments. When
the Revolution broke out and he joined the patriot cause,
a Tory poet warned him to stick to his last:

Meddle not with state affairs;

Keep acquaintance with the stars;

Science, David, is thy line;

Warp not Nature’s great design

If thou to fame wouldst rise.

Of that fellowship a fourth scientist, John Bartram,
achieved distinction in botany, traveling far and wide in the
colonies studying plant life, founding a botanical garden
at Philadelphia in 1739, and earning from Linneus the
high praise of being “‘the greatest natural botanist in the
world.”

It is no exaggeration to say that Franklin, who stood
head and shoulders above his countrymen in versatility and
intelligence, was one of the first men of his epoch in the
world and would have been an ornament to any nation.
He was an original thinker and a diligent investigator. “The
range of his interests was boundless. Not only did he
master the English tongue by the assiduous study of the
best models such as Addison and Steele; he learned to read
French, German, and Italian, opening by that labor the
door to continental wisdom. He was in regular corre-
spondence with fellow students in the young department of

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 10

science in England, France, Holland, Italy, and Germany;
he knew personally men like Lavoisier, the chemist, and
Buffon, the naturalist, and he won by the breadth of his
knowledge and his contributions to the new learning the
admiration of the leading scientists of his time.

In the practical arts of municipal government, as in
natural science, Franklin made many contributions of prime
importance. Through his printing establishment he
brought the thought of the Old World to the homes of
the New; he was the inspiration of the first American scien-
tific society, the moving spirit in the creation of the first
college on modern lines, author of significant works in
social economy, an inventor, an experimenter and discoverer
in the field of electricity, and founder of the first hospital
in Philadelphia. Universities honored themselves by giving
Franklin degrees; wherever he went the forerunners of the
modern age sought him out. He was made a member of
all the important scientific associations of Europe and to
him were sent opinions and criticisms touching the course
of thought throughout the western world. No one can run
through the volumes of his published works without being
profoundly impressed by the scope of his interests, the
shrewdness and freshness of his observations, and the
catholicity of his spirit. And to all his intellectual concerns
Franklin added heavy business cares, travel, and long public
service. It is not too much to say that Benjamin Franklin,
in the age of George II, almost divined the drift of the
twentieth century.

§

In the field of historical writing more than in natural
science the American colonists did work fairly comparable
to that of their contemporaries in Europe. By Bradford’s
amazing story of the Pilgrims, a bridge was built between
the narrow work of the monk and the treatise of the
scholar. Though Bradford saw the wonders of Providence
in the events of every season, he told a tale that makes

160 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

old Plymouth stand out of the past like a scene at night
under the glare of lightning. After a while, historians,
becoming less certain about the intimate purpose of God,
contented themselves with recording and describing, thus
preparing the way for the scientific school. By the opening
of the eighteenth century, the spirit of modern critical
scholarship appeared in historical writing in America as
in Europe. William Stith’s account of early Virginia issued
in 1747 was based on careful researches in the records
which would do credit to a present-day doctor of phi-
losophy; unhappily his first volume was so dull that pub-
lication had to be discontinued for want of buyers.

About the same time, Thomas Prince of Boston applied
the new methods to the history of New England. “I cite
my vouchers to every passage,’ he remarked, ‘‘and I have
done my utmost, first to find out the truth and then to
relate it in the clearest order.’’ Unfortunately his style
was so heavy that he was not encouraged to complete his
work. Near the end of the colonial period Thomas Hut-
chinson brought out the first volume of a history of Massa-
chusetts which combined talent for research with dignity
in composition and a certain air of impartiality, even though
his loyalty to the British empire shone through every page
of his story. Thus, the study of the past with a view to
understanding had begun to produce American works at
least as severe and detached, if not as pretentious, as the
writings of Hume and Robertson in Great Britain. By
systematic inquiries into colonial development, intellectual
leaders in America were evolving a consciousness of local
tendencies and a sense of their own historic mission.

Equally significant was the rise of social science, if in
inchoate form. As time passed, the pressing questions of
the day—trade, industry, land, paper money, relations with
the Indians, western expansion, agriculture, and interco-
lonial union—were discussed with increasing independence
and ability by a host of colonial writers, with Franklin, per-
haps, in the lead. All the issues of economics and politics

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 161

that vexed the provincial age can be traced in detail and
generality in the yellow pages of colonial pamphlets, books,
papers, and magazines. Indeed, little that was important
in current affairs escaped the shrewd writers of the time.

John Woolman, Quaker tailor and itinerant preacher,
for example, turned a calm and steady mind upon the very
foundations of the social order, the titles of his powerful
tracts revealing the catholic spirit of his inquiries: Consid-
erations on the Keeping of Negroes . . . Considerations
on Pure Wisdom and Human Policy; on Labor; on Schools;
and on the Right Use of the Lord’s Outward Gifts ...
Serious Considerations on Trade . . . A Plea for the Poor

. Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind—
the substance of some conversations betwen a labouring
man and a manrich in money . . . The Substance of Some
Conversations between a Thrifty Landholder and a Labour-
ing Man. Under such heads Woolman, in the spirit of Jesus
and with the caution of a worldly man, condemned slavery,
the misuse of wealth, the evils of great accumulations, the
miseries of poverty, and the waste of war.

Besides raising some pertinent questions as to the ethics
of private property in land, Woolman made a plea for short
hours and decent conditions for those who toiled. ‘The
Creator of the earth,” he said, “‘is the owner of it.’ Con-
vinced that the passion for acquisition was the source of
much wickedness and oppression and war, he warned the
mighty to use their estates as people holding trusts from
Heaven, exciting by his direct language such alarm among
the more prosperous brethren in trade that his plea for the
poor, though framed in 1764, was not published for thirty
years. In the writings of this simple workman born on
American soil in the reign of King George II are to be
found the roots of American intellectual radicalism.

To the ever-widening group of secular interests, which
now embraced science, history, and social economy, was:
added the law. In medieval times the clergy had furnished
nearly all the lawyers and had tried in their ecclesiastical

162 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

courts a wide range of important cases. During the Protes-
tant revolt, however, clerical courts were stripped of a large
part of their secular business, royal tribunals attended by
secular lawyers taking over the development of jurispru-
dence with its profound economic and social implications.
In the late period of colonial history, as we have said, this
new profession flourished like the green bay tree, occupying
a huge sector in the long battle line of verbal warfare—
especially in the division of politics. If the lawyers, unlike
the scientists, did not move in the direction of skepticism,
they did present a secular front to the claims of the clergy
on the empire of mind.
§

The esthetic interests of the American colonists like
those of the intellect were subject to the law of inheritance,
the demands of the local environment, the process of change,
and impacts from outside. Naturally the passion for
beauty, which all save the meanest desire to mingle in some
degree at least with their labor, first found expression in
objects of utility. None were so poor that they could not
command shelter, and when the early stage of log houses
passed, American architecture, derivative though it was of
necessity, flowered into dignity and grace in many parts of
the country. The Dutch clung closely to their own familiar
models that were secure in custom. ‘‘New Amsterdam,”’ as
Lewis Mumford points out, in Sticks and Stones, ‘‘was a
replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick houses,
and its well banked canals and fine gardens.’’ Masters of
baronial estates, in the South, instinctively followed Eng-
lish country-house models, sometimes importing bricks and
stones to insure correctness. Thus in Maryland, Virginia,
the Carolinas, and Georgia, under semi-feudal influences,
rose mansions in the grand style reflecting a classical heri-
tage filtered through Italian and French media and twisted
to serve the ends of opulent Georgian merchants in Eng-
land. These houses revealed taste, precision, and strength

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 163

but, like the Dutch homes of New Amsterdam, they were
copies of traditional designs forced into a new setting.
After all, the requirements of the Southern scene called for
no essential departures. :

It was rather in New England, with its closely-knit de-
mocracy and its firm communal life, that domestic archi-
tecture betrayed the widest spirit of originality. The subtle
influence of use and respect for general interests worked
vigorously in the mind of the designer-carpenter-builder ;
there was a sense of fitness, a grave power, and an engaging
serenity in the structures erected by their hands. |

All over the colonies, indeed, exigent factors conspired
to keep both public and private buildings near to the sub-
stance of things. The amount of wealth yet amassed
did not permit many designers to expatriate themselves for
long years of apprenticeship, thereby cutting themselves
loose from affectionate union with the earth of their an-
cestors. [here were riches in colonial America, but few
fortunes were great enough to allow that lavish display
which separates the arts from the business of living and
working. For such reasons as these the noblest examples -
of colonial architecture revealed the power of restraint and
simple .beauty,.commanding the admiration of succeeding
generations, and attracting servile copyists long after the
conditions which nourished the models had passed away
forever.

Similar influences told, of course, in the manufacture and
purchase of colonial furnishings, the English heritage sup-
_ plying models. The motive of use, as distinguished from
sale and profit, gave sincerity to every stick and every fabric
in the early days of colonial poverty. Tables and chairs ~
made at Plymouth, like those of medieval England, were
stocky and built to endure for centuries; John Alden’s work
stands firm after the lapse of three hundred years. In the
plain lines and severe forms was reflected a concern for
strength and utility, and, perhaps, a spirit of revolt against
the ornate designs of clerical establishments, akin to the

164 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

religious revolt—a disdain of soft things that was not
modified until the first battle against the wilderness was
won, allowing a certain geniality to creep into the labors
of Puritan woodworkers, especially in Connecticut.

There was beauty also in-the finest--fabrics that came
from the looms of colonial women and beginnings of
promise in the other arts in the midst of much harsh and
formal crudity. Experiments in pottery and glass in New
Jersey and Pennsylvania undoubtedly would have flowered
into praiseworthy achievements during the eighteenth cen-
tury, particularly in the German commuiuities, if English
restrictions and the influx of cheap Dutch ware had not
checked the enterprise of local artisans. Only in the South
did economic conditions run severely against the creative
arts; rich planters, even more than wealthy merchants of
Northern cities, bought their finer goods and wares from
England and the Continent; while slave labor bore no fruit
of consequence in craftsmanship.

Everywhere, inevitably, the taste of the colonists was
affected by the changing styles imported from abroad.
When the severity of the Cromwellian age was followed
by the luxuriant fancy of the Restoration, weathercock
fashions veered anew in the provinces. The age of Queen
Anne and the age of the Georges had their counterparts
in the New World, introducing more gew-gaws, frippery,
and tinsel.

Colonial artists who worked with the brush were truer
to English standards than were the people at large to her
common law and her patterns of living. Portraiture, being
the prevailing form of art in England, naturally became
the dominant expression in her colonies. Faces of kings,
queens, clerics, nobles, and great bourgeois looked down
upon the passing generations in the mother country; so in
America faces of eminent divines, prosperous merchants,
and rich planters—masters, mistresses, and some of their
children—were fixed in oils for posterity. At first these
colonial portraits were almost as stiff and awkward as the

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 165

saints and angels painted by the early Christian artists of
Italy, but in time, after wealth brought patronage and lei-
sure and after skill increased, angles were softened and an
occasional grace touched with curving line the severity of
lips and jaw.

Near the end of the epoch four painters had risen to high
distinction and had largely outgrown the provincial setting
—Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson
Peale, and Gilbert Stuart. West, of simplest Quaker par-
entage, was born in a little village near Philadelphia in
1738. Though self-taught in the beginning, he managed
at the age of twenty-two to reach Rome, goal of all aspir-
ing artists, and under the shadows of great traditions his
mind took on the form of established modes. Settling
finally in London, where a rich market had long offered
enticements to the painters of the western world, West was
patronized by persons of quality and money. He succeeded
Sir Joshua Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy,
won the favor of the king, and received royal commissions.
A knighthood was conferred upon him and at the close of
his prosperous life, he was buried with pomp in St. Paul’s.
West’s painting was “‘grandiloquent, pompous, pretentious,
posed,” a strange Quaker product, but his portraits made
a strong appeal to the court circles and to the rising bour-
geois of his day.

Copley likewise sprang from lowly origins and likewise.
spent his last years in fashionable London. He was born of
Irish parentage in Boston one year before Benjamin West;
and, except for some guidance from his father, a painter
and mezzotint maker, he too was self-taught. After mar-
rying a rich widow, Copley made the conventional trip to
Rome. On the completion of his European studies, he
returned to Boston, where he was liberally patronized by
the upper classes and where he might have remained had
not the Revolution broken in upon his career.

Combining high notions of royal prerogative with skill
in portraying ladies and gentlemen of similar political doc-

166 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

trines, Copley, on the outbreak of the War of Independ-
ence, threw in his lot with the loyalists, and in the hour
of their distress was forced to flee to London. There, like
West, he became popular; he exhibited at the Academy, was
graciously received in elegant circles, and flourished by
painting the portraits of those who could pay. If, as the
modern critic, Walter Pach, says, Copley ‘“‘has the true note
of the primitive in the intensity with which he studies his
people and must be reckoned with portraitists of almost the
highest order,” still in none of his work did he break
with tradition. It was in the spirit of such a genera-
tion that Peale and Stuart received the training which fitted
them to become artists of ‘“‘the republican court” founded
after the establishment of independence.

§

Every variety of intellectual interest and all the new
streams of tendency were as a matter of course reflected
in the colonial institutions for the diffusion of knowledge—
schools, libraries, bookshops, and the press. Naturally,
organized education, a heritage of the Old World, con-
tinued the traditions with which it started, for a mere sea
journey of four or five weeks worked no revolution in it.
When the period of settlement opened, the idea of free and
compulsory education supported by public taxation for the
children of all classes had nowhere occupied the thought of
statesmen. In Europe education began with the upper
ranks of society—in schools and colleges directed by the
clergy; and it stopped far short of universality.

England borrowed this education from the Continent.
In the Stuart age, when the colonies were founded, her
system included the two universities, Oxford and Cam-
bridge, the famous preparatory schools of Winchester and
Eton, innumerable private grammar schools in which Greek
and Latin ruled the curriculum, and a bewildering variety
of elementary schools, including dame schools, where the

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 167

abecedarians taught the rudiments of learning. All the in-
stitutions of the higher range owed their start to private
endowments: gifts of monarchs, powerful churchmen,
lords, ladies, guilds, and merchants. Some were free to cer-
tain classes of students; others combined scholarships with
tuition fees. No sign of free, tax-supported education had
appeared except in the poor laws which aimed at keeping
pauper children off the rates by training them for appren-
ticeship at public expense. If hungry for learning, the mass
of artisans and agricultural laborers had to rely mainly
upon the limited elementary instruction supplied by dissent-
ing religious sects to the humbler orders that furnished most
of the membership.

The characteristics of this system of education were few
and simple. All formal instruction, except thé most ele-
mentary, was given by the clergy or persons who conformed
to the orthodox standards of the Anglican Church. In no
seat of learning was religious doubt or heresy stamped out
with more zest than at Oxford and Cambridge, where the
spirit of Henry VIII’s act for abolishing diversity of
opinion was deeply cherished. ‘The primary purpose of
the higher studies, with Greek and Latin at the center of
things, was theological—the preparation of young men for
the church; but the religious elements were being rapidly
diluted by secular students who sought training in the
classics as the key to legal, medical, and other lore. By the
seventeenth century, it had become the proper thing for
country gentry and rich merchants to send their sons to
Oxford or Cambridge as a matter of decorum and reputa-
bility. Such being the aims of the higher learning, two
other characteristics of the system followed inevitably: the
total exclusion of women from collegiate institutions and a
marked indifference to the newest learning, especially to the
rising subject of natural science.

From top to bottom the English educational system
served as a guide to the immigrants who founded colonies
in America. It is easy, of course, to point out analogies

168 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with Dutch practice and to list important achievements by
the Germans, the Scotch, and the Huguenots; indeed, some
writers have ingeniously traced the sources of colonial edu-
cation to Holland; and it must be admitted that there were
striking similarities among the early schools of all Prot-
estant countries, similarities which resulted from the
fusion of Catholic traditions with sectarian aspirations.

However, the outstanding facts in this phase of colonial
history are written plainly in the record. Graduates of
Oxford and Cambridge were the educational leaders in the
early colonial settlements; nearly two hundred of them came
to New England within twenty years after the founding of
Plymouth, and they were among the earliest preachers and
teachers in Virginia. ‘The first college founded in the colo-
nies was Harvard, authorized by a vote of the General
Court of Massachusetts in 1636, endowed by John Harvard
two years afterward, and opened under Puritan auspices.
The second American college was William and Mary in
Virginia, chartered by the Crown in 1693 and launched
under Anglican control. ‘The idea of an institution of
higher learning had been broached in the Old Dominion as
early as 1617, but the governors, as practical men, had
frowned upon it. Long afterward when Dr. James Blair,
an Anglican of Scotch origin, went to the attorney-general
with a request for a collegiate charter and urged that the
people of Virginia had souls to be cared for, he was greeted
by the explosion: ‘Damn their souls! Let them make to-
bacco.” But the learned doctor was persistent and the
college was founded in 1693. A few years later the third
college, a Puritan institution, Yale, was chartered by the
legislature of Connecticut to fit youths “for publick em-
ployment both in Church and Civil State.”

Of the five additional colleges organized near the middle
of the eighteenth century, three may be traced mainly to
English origins; and all except one arose under religious
leadership. Princeton was Presbyterian in inspiration,
King’s College—now Columbia University—was Anglican,

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 169

Brown was Baptist, Rutgers was Dutch Reformed, and
Dartmouth, though non-sectarian, was missionary in motive.
These institutions, however, had members of various Prot-
estant sects on their boards of control and, unlike Oxford
and Cambridge, opened their doors to Christians of many
persuasions.

The one departure from the tradition of theological ends
was made in the Academy, later known as the College, of
Philadelphia. ‘This distinctive institution sprang princi-
pally from the labors of Benjamin Franklin, who, in his grip
upon realities, was more than a hundred years ahead of the
schoolmen of his age. Franklin himself had never been
ground through the college mill; he was endowed with a
lively imagination and curiosity, a love of knowledge, and
an appreciation of the social benefits that might be con-
ferred by education. Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia
he gathered around him a coterie of printers, shoemakers,
and carpenters who read books and thought things out for—
themselyes—a group known as the Junto, which he called
‘the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that
then existed in the province.” ‘Three questions asked of
new members revealed the spirit of this strange academy:
‘Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general
of what profession or religion soever? Do you think any
person ought to be harmed in his body, name, or goods for
mere speculative opinions or his external way of worship?
Do you love truth for truth’s sake and will you endeavor
impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate
iho Others?

With the support of the Junto, Franklin issued a plan
for a college, prudently concealing some of his liberal
opinions for fear he might alarm the pious. As a result of
his appeal for funds, five thousand pounds was raised to
start the institution. A board of control was then organ-
ized containing the spokesmen of several sects and a Scotch
clergyman was chosen as provost; but some of the orig-
inality and temper of the founder, as we shall see, was dis-

170 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

closed in the scientific and secular program of instruction
offered to those who did not want to concentrate on Greek

and Latin.
§

The course of instruction in the early colonial colleges
was based essentially on the program of Oxford and Cam-
bridge, which had risen during the Middle Ages under the
auspices of the Catholic Church. Since the laws, decrees,
services, and literature of the Church were in Latin, that
tongue became the original language of learning for all
western Europe. In the classical revival of the renaissance,
however, the study of Greek began to engross the interest
of progressive scholars, and by dint of hard labor cham-
pions of that tongue were able to force it into the universi-
ties against the protests of the Latinists well content with
their monopoly.

The substance of the medieval university curriculum
rested on foundations as old as the academy at Athens.
After groping around a long time in their search for a
structure of education, the Greeks came to a general agree-
ment upon certain subjects which they deemed appropriate
for gentlemen of leisure—‘“‘liberal arts,’ as contrasted with
the vulgar arts of trade, industry, and labor. On the basis
of the Greek scheme, Catholic scholars, in the early Middle
Ages, erected the program of the seven liberal arts—
grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astron-
omy, and music—which they bent to theological purposes.
When the Protestant clergy of the Established Church took
over the universities in England, they turned these studies
to the uses of a different creed, but they continued the old
tongues and the old methods, to the practical exclusion
still of the English language and literature.

On this historic model, with its roots so far back in the
past and its purposes so far removed from the ends of trade
and agriculture, was fashioned the instruction in the older
colonial colleges. In each of them the course was confined

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 171

mainly to Greek and Latin, drill in Aristotelian logic, a
smattering of elementary mathematics, and thin shreds of
natural science. For the benefit of the more ambitious
theological students, Hebrew was sometimes added.
Although the colleges that arose in the later colonial period
showed a tendency to widen their program of studies, an-
cient languages, rhetoric, scholastic philosophy, and logic,
shaped primarily for theologians, continued to hold the
citadel of the higher learning. Such elements of law, medi-
cine, and science as made their way into the universities of
England and America were chiefly fragments in the ancient
mosaic.

The vitalizing subjects of English literature, history,
geography, and political economy naturally received little
attention from the masters of such formal learning. It is
true that the age of exploration and settlement produced
Shakespeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Bunyan,
Pepys, Dryden, Butler, Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope, and
Defoe but in neither the English nor’the American colleges ~
did instruction in the great works of English authors receive
systematic consideration. In the sight of the schoolmen
Latin was more worthy than the language of the sea, the
house, the field, and the shop used by the English people
in general. As a matter of fact the first grammar of the
vernacular tongue, which appeared in 1594, was written in
Latin and when, a quarter of a century later, a grammar
was issued in English, its author laid stress on the fact that
it furnished a groundwork for the study of Latin. Even
when the popular tongue was finally disentangled from
Latin and a library of noble books had been written in it,
the study of English yet found no place in collegiate work.

History and political science also remained among the.
subjects pursued only by curious gentlemen of leisure or
those who turned to the uses of the pamphleteer. Though
Oxford had a professorship of ancient history as early as
1622, a century passed before the regius professorships of
modern history were founded at the English universities;

172 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and in that respect the colonies lagged behind the mother
country. The Revolution was raging when Yale created
a professorship of ecclesiastical history—the first chair of
history in the colonies—and the nineteenth century was well
advanced when Harvard gave Jared Sparks an opportunity
to teach the story of America..

With even more neglect at the hands of scholars, geog-
raphy was left to take form under the direction of travelers,
navigators, and collectors of books and maps; as a
subject of instruction it found a favorable reception only
here and there by some enthusiastic master or astronomer
inclined to wander out of his allotted field. ‘Though polit-
ical economy was added by Franklin to his immense and
varied interests and given at least a place in the crowded
curriculum of the Philadelphia College, it had no standing
as a branch of learning elsewhere. At the other institu-
tions, no professor appears to have given the theme more
than a passing glance in the wide sweep of his moral
philosophy. In a word, all those grand branches of knowl-
edge pertaining to the material universe and the science of
society—branches which are the glory of research and in-
struction in the modern university—received little more
than a fleeting recognition in the colleges of the colonial age
either in England or in America. ‘Their very structures
were still in the process of formation.

So firmly fixed was the grip of tradition upon learning
that Franklin, with all his twisting and turning, could not
work a complete revolution in the course of study planned
for the College of Philadelphia. In the interest of peace
and endowment, a compromise was made. Latin, Greek,
and the scholastic subjects of the age were provided for
boys who wished to prepare for law, medicine, or divinity.
Unto these things were added, for the benefit of those
intending to follow other paths, such practical studies as
mathematics, surveying, navigation, and accounting; scien-
tific branches—mechanics, physics, chemistry, agriculture,
and natural history; instruction in history, civics, ethics,

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 173

government, trade, commerce, and international law; and
finally, for the worldly wise and curious, training in modern
languages.

Such was the plan worked out by Franklin in codperation
with the first provost, William Smith, for the college
launched in 1755. To suggest that it anticipated the most
enlightened program evolved by the liberal university of
the late nineteenth century is to speak with caution; in fact,
it stands out like a beacon light in the long history of human
intelligence. Nor is it without significance that the first
liberal institution of higher learning in the western world
appeared on the frontier of civilization—in colonial
America where an energetic people was wrestling with the
realities of an abundant nature and the problems of self-
government. ‘Though a Scotch clergyman gave academic
form to the course of instruction at Philadelphia, the spirit
and concept came from Benjamin Franklin, a self-educated,
provincial workman whose mind had never been conquered
by the scholastics.

If, on the whole, the colonial college was narrow in its
intellectual range, it need not be supposed that the discipline
offered was correspondingly thorough in every case or that
a deadly uniformity of opinion ruled all classrooms from
Cambridge to Williamsburg. Ttwo Dutch travelers who
visited Harvard in 1680 found only ten or twenty students
in residence and reported somewhat adversely on their
attainments: “They could hardly speak a word of Latin
so that my comrade could not converse with them. They
took us to the library where there was nothing particular.
We looked over it a little. They presented us with a
glass of wine. . . . [he minister of the place goes there
morning and evening to make prayer.”

Half a century later that impassioned evangelist, George
Whitefield, was no more favorably impressed. He thought
that Harvard was ‘‘not far superior to our Universities in
piety and true godliness. Tutors neglect to pray with and
examine the hearts of their pupils. Discipline is at too low

174 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

an ebb. Bad books are become fashionable among them.”
At William and Mary the godly were also shocked by
modernism rampant. William Small, the professor of
mathematics and philosophy, taught from his chair doc-
trines which almost anticipated the nineteenth century, and
so unsettled the minds of young men like Thomas Jefferson
that fond parents trembled for the morals of their offspring.
It was for this reason that James Madison was sent away to
Princeton where “‘the fountain of learning was undefiled.”

On the whole it would seem that the opportunities for
acquiring knowledge, as distinct from learning, were about
as good in America as in England, if Gibbon, the historian,
is to be accepted as authority. ‘“[he Fellows or monks of
my time,” he lamented in speaking of Oxford at the middle
of the eighteenth century, “were decent easy men, who
supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days were
filled by a series of uniform employments—the chapel, the
hall, the coffee-house, and the common room—till they re-
tired weary and well satisfied to a long slumber. From the
toil of reading, writing, or thinking they had absolved
their consciences. Their conversation stagnated in a round
of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and
private scandal.” In any case, collegiate education of the
eighteenth century, both in the mother country and the
provinces, immersed the students in theories and dogmas
that had little or no relation to creative intelligence or
independent thinking.

In this, of course, there was nothing unnatural. The
fundamental purpose in the establishment of all the col-
leges, except that at Philadelphia, was to train clergymen,
not to foster the inquiring spirit of natural science. Among
the primary motives that inspired the founders of Harvard
was the fear of leaving ‘‘an illiterate ministry to the
Churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”’
Five out of seven of its early graduates became preachers
and, down until the end of the seventeenth century, more
than one half of them turned to that calling. As late as

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 175

1753 the legislature of Connecticut, in a resolution referring
to Yale, declared that “one principal end proposed in erect-
ing the college was to supply the churches in this colony with
a learned, pious, and orthodox ministry.”’ A dearth of
learned parsons was also a weighty argument in the plea
that led to the foundation of William and Mary, and, in-
deed, all other colonial colleges save only Franklin’s insti-
tution.

Still, as time flowed on, young men preparing for law and
medicine flocked in increasing numbers to the colleges, even
though no radical changes were made in the classical and
theological curriculum to meet the requirements of their
vocations. As a matter of fact, Greek and Latin, owing
to the amount of secular learning locked up in those tongues,
were useful to lawyers and doctors. Moreover, much of
the dialectic designed to equip preachers for vanquishing
sectarian foes and the devil could be turned to good account
by lawyer-politicians in the battle of wits that preceded and
accompanied the Revolution; for the science of argument
and persuasion evolved by the Greeks, adopted by the
Romans, and taken over by the theologians was so complete
that it seemed hardly necessary to improve on traditional
methods. But as in England, so in America, lawyers and
physicians had to supplement their collegiate course with
apprenticeship to practitioners to secure their professional
training; it was 1765 when Philadelphia, in her grand ad-
vance all along the line, set even the laggard mother country
an example by founding a medical school, the first on the
continent of North America.

§

Following similar traditions, the early secondary institu-
tions of America were fashioned after the English grammar
school designed to prepare boys for college. When the
legislature of Massachusetts in 1647 sanctioned the erection
of higher schools in the towns, it indicated that the purpose

176 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

was the instruction of youths “so farr as they may be fited
for ye university.’ In the Middle and Southern colonies,
however, where, with the exception of William and Mary,
no college appeared until near the eve of the struggle for
independence, the higher schools were shaped to meet the
requirements of trade rather than college entrance. For
example, the free school or academy of Charleston, South
Carolina, established in 1712, taught “writing, arithmetic,
and merchants’ accounts, and also the art of navigation and
surveying and other useful and practical parts of mathe-
matics.” [he prospectus of a similar institution of the
same period in New York advertised ‘‘all branches of the
mathematics, geometry, algebra, geography, navigation,
and merchants’ bookkeeping.” Practical aims likewise
figured in the course of instruction in Franklin’s academy,
which grew into the College of Philadelphia.

In Virginia the sons of planters who sailed away for
Oxford or Cambridge or entered William and Mary near-
by were usually prepared for admission by family tutors
or at the few private schools kept by clergymen. Jefferson,
for instance, was put into a small English school in his
neighborhood when he was five years old; at the age of nine
he was sent to live as a boarding pupil in the family of a
Scotch parson; and he completed his preparation for
William and Mary at the private school of James Maury, a
Huguenot inclined to skepticism and good living. When at
the age of seventeen he set out on horseback for college, he
had seen nothing of the world twenty miles beyond the cir-
cuit of his home and had never been in a town having more
than one hundred inhabitants.

§

The primary schools at the bottom of the system of
formal education were, like the colleges, inspired by the
religious motive—to which was sometimes joined the ma-
terial consideration of preparing children of the poor for

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 177

apprenticeship. The idea of elementary schools supported
by taxation, freed from clerical control and offering instruc-
tion to children of all classes, found no expression in colonial
America. Indeed it was foreign to the experience of the
Greeks, Romans, and Europeans of the Middle Ages whose
psychology still dominated the West. The slaves of Athens
and Rome, the serfs and artisans of the Middle Ages, were
not in the mass within the scope of the educational systems
of their time, even though bright boys frequently climbed
from lowly origins to dizzy heights. Moreover, the Catho-
lic concept of authority did not demand any severe mental
drill for the commonalty until the Church was rudely
shaken by the Protestant revolt.

It was that cataclysm which marked the beginnings of
popular education. Protestant sects, especially the Dis-
senters in England, having asserted their right to a limited
private judgment, found it necessary to resort to the school-
master to impose their respective creeds on their children
and to defend them against other ideas deemed erroneous.
Since they belonged mainly to the mercantile and laboring
classes, rather than to the nobility, Dissenters also found it
useful to combine with the memorizing of catechisms some
additional instruction, in writing, arithmetic, and the prac-
tical arts, so useful to the shop and counting house.

Wherever, therefore, a dissenting sect arose in Europe
or in Great Britain—Huguenot, Lutheran, Presbyterian, —
Puritan, Separatist, Baptist, or Quaker—there soon ap-~
peared primary schools supported by the contributions of
the congregation or by the fees of the parents and dedicated
to the instruction of the young in the rudiments of learning.
By way of supplement, missionary zeal also entered the field ~
of elementary instruction, providing charity schools for the
poor liable to be led astray by the wiles of the wicked. For
example, the Anglican Society for the Promotion of Chris-
tian Knowledge, founded in 1698, established in many parts
of England primary institutions to give the children of the

working classes the Anglican view of salvation, together

178 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with the elements of reading and writing and the “grounds
of Arithmetick to fit them for Service or Apprentices.”

To the sectarian, missionary, and charity motives was
added another—the relief of the taxes collected for the
support of paupers by the training of children likely to be-
come public charges. In response to this practical require-
ment, the great poor law of 1601, enacted at the close of
Elizabeth’s reign, ordered the compulsory apprenticeship of
all children not provided with an independent living and
placed squarely upon property owners the burden of sup-
porting their elementary education. Such were the roots of
primary education in America. ‘They were not Dutch or
English, Presbyterian or Puritan; they were Protestant and
realistic.

Now, the American colonies were peopled largely by
dissenting Protestants. Wherever a tiny community of
Puritans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, or Lutherans
was formed, some kind of an elementary school for the chil-
dren of the sect was sure to follow in the course of time.
But there were other sections of the populace not as easily
supplied with the rudiments. The pioneer districts, with
their scattered homesteads, the wide plantation system of
the Southern seaboard, and the more densely settled regions
with servants poor in worldly goods and often lacking in
respect for the religion of their employers, presented special
problems that required, as far as they were met at all,
special treatment.

In response to such needs several types of educational
activities unfolded in the colonies. On the very edge of the
advancing frontier ardent missionaries opened log-cabin
schools for the members of their sect and any others who
would attend. For the children of the poor, the English
charity school sprang up here and there in town and country.
‘Our advice is,’’ declared the Friends of Pennsylvania and
New Jersey at their yearly meeting in 1722, “that all
Friends’ children have so much learning as to read the holy
scriptures and other English books and to write and cast

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 179

accounts . . . and for that end let the rich help the poor.”’
In New England the duty of parents to educate their chil--
dren and masters their apprentices and servants in the ways
of salvation and in the practical arts was early emphasized
by legislative enactment.

The laws of Massachusetts on this point have been so
glossed over with uncritical comment that they have been
hailed as marking the dawn of public education in the
modern and secular form. In reality, seen in their historical
setting, they do no such thing. The act of 1642 required

the chosen men of each town to supervise the children of ——

the community and ‘to take account .. . especially of
their ability to read and understand the principles of re-
ligion and the capital laws of this country.” It likewise
required them—as the overseers of the poor were com-
pelled to do under the legislation of Elizabeth—to put to
apprenticeship the children of all parents ‘‘not able and fit
to bring them up.”’ The avowed occasion for the law was
the neglect of masters and parents in training “their chil-
dren in learning and labor.’ Five years later came the act
of 1647 which ordered every town of fifty householders to .
appoint a teacher for ‘‘all such children as shall resort to
him to read and write,” and added that every town with a
hundred households should establish a grammar school for
the instruction of youths preparing for college.

These laws, which seem to have been honored in the
breach as well as in the observance, have been greeted by a
modern educator as making for the first time in the English
language ‘‘a legally valid assertion of the right of the state
to require of local communities that they establish and
maintain schools of general learning.” The unwary are
liable to be misled by this contention. Unquestionably the
first of these acts was conceived partly in the spirit of the
English poor law; while the second flowed from a great
desire to impose on all children the creed of the Puritan”
sect. The fact that the education was ordered by ‘“‘the
state’ was of no special significance, for the state and church ~

180 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

were one in Massachusetts at the time; indeed, if the
Mathers were to be believed, the church was superior to
the state.

At all events no person who was not a member of a
Puritan congregation could vote in Massachusetts until
the English Crown broke down the barrier in the charter
of 1691; and the teachers chosen under the school system
established by the law were as orthodox as those selected
for sectarian schools supported by the fees and contribu-
tions of the faithful or for the charity schools maintained
by gifts from the devout. Certainly the New England
Primer which “taught millions to read and not one to sin”’
was not secular in outlook or purpose. Indeed, the Massa-
chusetts law of 1647 was avowedly framed to outwit “‘that
old deluder Satan,” by giving the youth a correct knowledge
of the Scriptures. And appropriately too the New England
Primer was English in origin and purpose and was
widely used in the mother country as well as in the
provinces.

In any case, whether or not popular education in some
form was prescribed by law, as in Massachusetts—and,
indeed, in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maryland—it
was the enthusiasm of the religious denominations; rather
than the enlightenment of public officials, that kept the lamp
of learning burning in the colonies. No thickly settled com-
munity, no sect of any importance, was without its ele-
mentary institution at least, supporting teachers by fees and
contributions including gifts from England in aid of Ameri-
can missionary efforts. Supplementing the sectarian schools
were itinerant pedagogues who collected tuition charges
from parents and “boarded around” to eke out a living.

Occasional glimpses into colonial primary schools, af-
forded by diaries and memoirs, reveal severity in discipline
and dogmatism in instruction. Social heritage approved
both. Spartans beat their children and cowed them under
the rod of war. The Romans seem to have followed their
example even with additions: Horace called his teacher

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 181

“the thrasher.”” The Middle Ages carried on the vogue;
pictures of medizval teachers represent them with rod in
hand as if but seeking an excuse to strike. In this wont
and use the Protestants made no change worthy of note;
Martin Luther taught that appropriate beatings were good
to restrain impudence and advance learning. Rules for the
school of colonial Dorchester declared that “the rod of
correction is an ordinance of God, sometimes to be dis-
pensed unto children.”

Moreover, the school fathers of colonial times, often
beset by poverty themselves, could not always be fastidious
in the selection of teachers. Sometimes they went down to
the docks and bought an indentured servant who professed
to know the rudiments and made him schoolmaster for the
boys and girls of the community. In fact, interspersed in
the columns of the newspapers with advertisements of
slaves, rice, boots, lime juice, and crockery were notices of
teachers for sale into terms of indenture. ‘To be disposed
of, a likely servant man’s time for 4 years who is very well
qualified for a clerk or to teach a school, he reads, writes,
understands arithmetick, and accompts very well, Enquire
of the Printer hereof,” runs a notice in the Philadelphia
Mercury in 1735. A teacher who could be lawfully beaten
by his own master was probably not inclined to spare the
rod of authority over little children entrusted to his care.

In this colonial scheme of instruction girls met with the
traditional discriminations. They were as a matter of
course shut out of the colleges and the grammar schools that
prepared for the colleges, for they were not to be preachers,
orators, statesmen, doctors, or lawyers. In short, unless a
family tutor was provided the avenues to higher learning
were automatically closed to them. ‘To the elementary-
schools, it seems, girls were generally admitted, at least to
learn reading, the catechism, and perhaps some arithmetic.
For the special use of the middle classes, day and boarding
schools were opened in many regions under private patron-
age, to impart the rudiments deemed essential to the social

182 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

graces—reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing, music, and
dancing. Nowhere, however, was the feminine mind invited
by pedagogues to explore curious places. In those days,
women, as Governor Winthrop declared, were expected to
stick to household matters and to refrain from meddling
“in such things as are proper for men whose minds are
stronger.”
§

If schools confined their students rather closely to the
classical and theological routine, shopkeepers provided
young and old with the current literature of England and
the Continent. From the earliest times it was the common
practice for merchants to take orders for books to be im-
ported and to bring over on their own motion stocks for
their shelves. Following the custom of the trade, Robert
Pringle, in 1744, called the attention of South Carolinians
to the fact that he had for sale ‘‘very reasonable” a con-
signment of “sundry goods, particularly a very choice col-
lection of printed Books, Pictures, Maps, and Pickles.”

After the newspaper business was fairly launched, print-
ers not only published American books on their own account,
but also kept on hand imported works for their customers.
Franklin was offering Bacon, Dryden, Locke, Milton, Swift,
Seneca, and Ovid to his patrons in the opening days of his
career in Philadelphia. So in one fashion or another, the
great writings of the times, as well as the classics, were
made available to the owners of private libraries, such as
Colonel Byrd at Westover, and to enterprising individuals
who were trying to educate themselves. Few things of
first rate importance in England and France at least seem
to have been overlooked. The writings of the French
philosophers—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the
Encyclopedists—no less than the heavy theological tomes
and the newest scientific books from Great Britain were put
into the hands of the colonials with amazing promptness
and at moderate prices.

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 183

Those who could not afford to buy books were not alto-
gether without resources, especially in the larger towns.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Boston, Newport,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston had small libraries
open to the public. In 1653, Robert Keayne presented the
citizens of Boston with a little collection of books; in 1731,
Franklin started a subscription library in connection with
his Junto; in 1748, seventeen young men in Charleston
opened a library for “self-improvement”; in 1754, the
Society Library was founded in New York.

For the rising democracy of colonial America, the most
noteworthy of these experiments was the subscription
library which Franklin established with the aid of a few
“poor tradesmen and mechanics. It was he who showed how
forty or fifty persons could, by pooling meager savings,
open gateways hitherto closed to all save the rich. ‘The
institution,” as he said, “soon manifested its utility, was
imitated by other towns and in other provinces. The libra-
ries were augmented by donations; reading became fashion-
able; and our people, having no public amusement to divert
their attention from study became better acquainted with
books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to
be better instructed and more intelligent than people of
the same rank generally are in other countries. . . . The
libraries have improved the general conversation of the
Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as
intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and
perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand
generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their
privileges.”

Although no census of literacy was ever taken in the
colonial age, there was abundant collateral evidence to sup-
port Franklin’s contention that a very large proportion of
the American people could read and write. It was a fact
of no small portent that a hundred thousand copies of
Thomas Paine’s first pamphlet calling for independence were
sold while the issue was fresh from the press. The work

184 THE RISE OPCAMERICAN \‘CHALIZATION

of the schools, tutors, libraries, printers, and booksellers
was widely supplemented by that of patient fathers and
mothers who pored with their children over primers and
spelling books. By these routes, little rivulets of opinion
were sent streaming down into the torrent that swept the
thirteen English colonies into the American republic.

§

That other great institution for the promotion of intel-
lectual interests, the press, rose and flourished as if to
emphasize, while distributing, knowledge of worldly affairs.
Thus another body of preachers—newspaper editors—
could thunder away every week or so and, unlike their breth-
ren of the cloth, cover the whole domain of war, politics,
business, current events, and scandal, that is, as long as
they avoided collisions with colonial officials. Leaving
out of the reckoning the early broadsides and a little sheet,
Publick Occurrences, which appeared and died in 1690,
the first regular newspaper in the colonies was The Boston
News-Letter, a tiny four-page, two-column folder, estab-
lished in 1704. Fifteen years later, The American Weekly
Mercury came from the press of Andrew Bradford in
Philadelphia and before long New York, Maryland, South
Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia could also boast of
local papers.

At the middle of the century came a second burst of
journalistic enterprise. In 1755, The Gazette was founded
in New Haven and within ten years North Carolina, New
Hampshire, and Georgia had printers engaged in purveying
news, essays, and gossip, domestic and foreign. When the
struggle over the Stamp Act began in 1765 every colony,
except Delaware and New Jersey, had one or more papers
to speak for the contending parties and those two colonies
were well served by the printers of New York and Phila-
delphia. Some of the publishers were sustained by the
profits of public printing and held under the thumb of the

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 185

royal governor; others struggled along under the patronage
of the popular party aided by the advertising of friendly
merchants.

The political and cultural significance of this early Ameri-
can journalism, crude as it appears to the sophisticated of
modern times, can hardly be overestimated. If narrow in
its range, it was wider and freer than the pulpit and the
classroom and it was an art open to any person, group, fac-
tion, or party that could buy a press and exercise enough
literary skill to evade the heavy hand of colonial authori-
ties.

By any editor of spirit the note of independence could
be struck; indeed, it was sounded early in the eighteenth
century by The New England Courant, established in 1721
by Benjamin Franklin’s brother and supported by a body
of “respectable characters’? bearing the audacious title of
“The Hell-Fire Club,” a little fraternity that wrote rather
peppery stuff to give spice to reports of governors’ ad-
dresses and chronicles of official doings. Essays, done in
the style of Addison and Steele—many of them by Franklin,
then in his youth—poured ridicule on the great and good.
As the authors undoubtedly expected, some of their dia-
tribes got under the skins of the mighty; and on one occa-
sion, the elder Franklin was imprisoned for reflections on
the august assembly of the colony. The day foreseen by
the rabid governor of Virginia had come. In 1671 he had
blurted out his official opinion: “I thank God we have no
free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience and
heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged
them and libels against the government. God keep us from
both.”

Long before the governor’s allotted century had van-
ished, royal agents had come to grips with the unarmed dis-
seminators of dangerous thoughts. In 1734 the first great
contest in America over freedom of the press opened in
New York with the arrest of Peter Zenger, publisher of

186 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The Journal, for assailing the administration of the pro-
vincial governor. The trial which followed proved to be a
dramatic episode as well as a defeat for the king’s repre-
sentative. An able attorney, Andrew Hamilton, brought
up from Philadelphia to plead for the printer after local
lawyers had been cowed into submission, conducted the case
with a grand flourish, making the issue “‘the cause of
liberty.” Moved by his argument and imbued no doubt
with popular sympathies, the jury defied the judge, and
amid general rejoicing gave the imprisoned editor his
liberty.

When, however, the tables were turned in New Hamp-
shire long afterward by a local editor who attacked the
majesty of the colonial legislature and the Continental
Congress, the victim did not escape so easily; he was or-
dered to appear before the provincial assembly, sharply
censured there, and solemnly warned not to ‘print more
criticisms of the popular party. Thus the twists and turns
to be found in the struggle between liberty and authority,
so familiar to-day, wound their way into the journalism of
the eighteenth century.

Fermenting opinion stirred by mettlesome editors, in the
fullness of time, took on a national character. While the
circulation of each paper was mainly local, publishers ex-
changed sheets with one another and reprinted striking
articles of continental interest, spreading them all the way
from Portsmouth to Savannah. Moreover, citizens of the
larger outlook subscribed to journals from distant cities,
for in 1758 the colonial post office, which had long carried
newspapers without charge, was compelled to fix a rate on
the ground that ‘“‘the News-papers of the several Colonies
on this Continent, heretofore permitted to be sent by the
Post free of Charge, are of late years so much increased
as to become extremely burthensome to the Riders.”’ What
seems to be the first cartoon printed in the colonies—Frank-
lin’s snake cut into eight pieces, entitled “Join or Die’—an
appeal to the provincials to unite against the French and

PROVINCIAL AMERICA 187

—

Indians in 1754, was copied far and wide and became one
of the great American symbols of the age. A moving call
to arms against the French issued about the same time by
the Virginia Gazette was printed again and again by North-
ern papers in their campaign for solidarity against the
common foe. Clearly the institution of the press, operating, -
at least in a measure, on a national scale, was prepared to
serve the lawyers and politicians who were to kindle the
flames of revolution.
§

In the newspapers and pamphlets—the latter sometimes
printed first in the columns of weekly journals and some-
times issued separately—began to appear the literature of
the new politics, swelling in volume as the colonies grew in
stature and the controversy with the British government
grew in acerbity. It was largely in the form of letters and
special articles that the passions of the conflict were first
announced outside the halls of assemblies and taverns.
Unlike France of the Old Régime, provincial America did
not produce, long before the struggle commenced, great
treatises such as the Encyclopedia or ringing calls for revolt
such as Rousseau’s Social Contract.

The reasons were not difficult to find: the colonists
already had textbooks of revolution in the writings of Eng-
lishmen who defended and justified the proceedings of the
seventeenth century—above all, John Locke’s writings,
wherein was set forth the right of citizens to overthrow
governments that took their money or their property with-
out their consent. In such documents arguments for the
American Revolution were at hand in clear and authorita-
tive English. All that editors and publicists had to do was
to paraphrase, decorate, and repeat. Moreover, the Ameri-
can ruling classes, unlike the French bourgeoisie, had
already wrested the government from the royal authorities
by 1765; their uprising was designed to preserve what they
had, rather than to gain something new and untried.

188 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

So when Otis, the Adamses, Dickinson, Hamilton, Jeffer-
son, and other philosophers of revolt set to work on pam-
phlets, letters, resolutions, proclamations, declarations, and
constitutions they found, ready made before them and intel-
ligible to the reading public, all the theories and dogmas
which their cause required. They had only to use English
rhetoric and precedent in forging their own greater argu-
ment; but in actual fact they went beyond the rule of thumb,
giving to their noblest writings some of the gravity of
Roman orators, some of the rhythm and cadence of Latin
poets.

No one can rise from a comparative study of the litera-
ture of revolution in all ages without a sense of profound
admiration for the ingenuity, the learning, and the mastery
of the native tongue revealed in the documents of the
American revolt. Lord Chatham pronounced no hollow
encomium in saying to his colleagues: “‘When your lord-
ships look at the papers transmitted to us from America;
when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you
cannot but respect their cause and wish to make it your own.
For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my reading
and observation—and it has been my favorite study—lI
have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the
master statesmen of the world—that for solidity of reason-
ing, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such
a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body
of men can stand in preference to the general congress at

Philadelphia.” i

CHAPTER V

The Clash of Metropolis and Colony
(J teers the origin of the American Revolution

there are as many theories as there are writers of sa,

gas. The oldest hypothesis, born of the conflict on
American soil, is the consecrated story of school textbooks:
the Revolution was an indignant uprising of a virtuous
people, who loved orderly and progressive government,
against the cruel, unnatural, and unconstitutional acts of
King George III. From the same conflict arose, on the
other side, the Tory interpretation: the War for Independ-
ence was a violent outcome of lawless efforts on the part of
bucolic clowns, led by briefless pettifoggers and smuggling
merchants, to evade wise and moderate laws broadly con-
ceived in the interest of the English-speaking empire. Such
were the authentic canons of early creeds.

With the flow of time appeared some doubts about the
finality of both these verdicts. The rise of democracy in
England during the nineteenth century modified the theory
long current in that country. In the minds of English
Liberals, who hated Tories as much as Lord North and

189

190 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
Dr. Johnson despised Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry,

a novel pattern was finally evolved: the contest in America
was only the counterpart of the heroic struggle led by
Russell, Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone at home to estab-
lish the dominion of the English mill owners over Crown,
clergy, and landed aristocracy.

Sustained by partisan conflict, this thesis took on bihie guise
of sober history in the writings of May, Green, and
Trevelyan and was accepted as the truth at last by the small
and select circle in the United States that took pride in
being intellectual. Meanwhile there grew up in America
a school of so-called scientific historians who looked with
hauteur upon all partisan theories—even though well bol-
stered by documents—and went straight to the original
records, papers, memoirs, and other contemporary sources
relative to the great epoch. ‘The result of their labors was
a number of special studies which somewhat chilled the
glowing periods of the orators and slowly broke down
under the weight of scholarship the original American
articles of faith. Social amenities hastened the disintegra-
tion; many descendants of revolutionary heroes, having ac-
cumulated or inherited fortunes, found a welcome in the
best English society, where they began to look with kindlier
eyes upon the offspring of the ‘‘minions of George III.”

Fury kindled by passions, especially after America
entered the World War, fed the stream of tendency. In the
fervor of the moment,. over-zealous American scholars,
rushing from research to propaganda, rewrote their books
to show that the American Revolution was more or less of
a moral and tactical error on the part of the Patriot
Fathers. After all, ran the latest hypothesis, the Revolu-
tion was the result of a needless and unfortunate quarrel
in which many untrue and unjust things had been said and
done; so it seemed best to cover the past with the mantle
of oblivion and rejoice that it was the English-speaking
people who had from time immemorial led the world in the
fight of democracy against autocracy.

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 191

But when the economic and ethical reunion of the sun-
dered segments of the old British Empire seemed almost
effected, the peace of Versailles broke in upon the cele-
bration. ‘Then the voices of the Germans and Irish were
heard again in the land and those who had reveled in the
sunlight of an Anglo-American alliance suddenly found
themselves frosted in the blasts of renewed criticism.
History once more registered shifting winds.

On taking up any work dealing with the American Revo-
lution it is necessary, therefore, to inquire about the assump-
tions upon which the author is operating. Is he preparing
to unite the English-speaking peoples in the next world
war? Does he have in mind some Teutonic or Hibernian
concept of American polity? Or is he desirous of discover-
ing how the conflict arose without any reference to the
devices of current politicians? As for this book, the pur-
pose is simple, namely, to inquire into the pertinent facts
which conditioned the struggle between the men who goy-
erned England and those who ruled the thirteen colonies
——on the theory that only adolescents allow ancient grudges
to affect their judgments in matters international.

§

With respect to the American side, it is hoped, the essen-
tial materials assembled in the preceding pages fairly de-
scribe the economic activities, political institutions, and cul-
tural life which distinguished the American people from
those of the mother country. On the other side, the signifi-
cant data can be made to stand out in equally bold relief.
England in the eighteenth century was ruled by two power-
ful, well-knit classes: landlords and merchants, with little or
no restraint from artisans and agricultural laborers. ‘The
fierce contest between the aristocracy and the middle orders
that had filled the seventeenth century with revolution had
died down into a relatively mild political debate.

Indeed, the ranks of the former were now largely re-

192 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

cruited from trading circles; earls did not often object to
marrying their sons to the daughters of affluent merchants;
dukes were as eager as greengrocers to invest in the stocks
of African slavers or American commercial ventures. Both
houses of Parliament were controlled by agents of these two
branches of English society. ‘The landed proprietors, be-
sides having a permanent stronghold in the House of Lords,
commanded many seats in the lower chamber; while the
merchants usually found pliant spokesmen in members sent
to the Commons from the towns.

By the system of representation the rule of small and
active groups in the landed and commercial classes: was
especially favored. The suffrage was so restricted by prop-
erty qualifications that not more than one hundred and sixty
thousand Englishmen among eight million people enjoyed
the right to vote. New cities like Liverpool, Manchester,
and Leeds, which had grown up since the origin of Parlia-
ment in the middle ages, were without any representatives
at all in the House of Commons; on the other hand, petty
villages, with very few voters controlled by some neigh-
boring landlord, sent one or two members to Westminster.
It would be a conservative estimate to say that ten thousand
landlords and merchants ruled the England of George III.
Even the Crown was merely one branch of government
employed in the realization of their interests. Subjected to
Parliament by the Revolution of 1688, it had been further
weakened during the reigns of the first Georges who, as
long as their purses were filled, were more interested in
their German home of Hanover than in quarreling about
historic prerogatives with parliamentary leaders. In 1750,
therefore, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of
the English political system were dominated by closely knit
bodies of landlords and prosperous merchants—with the
latter growing in wealth, numbers, and power.

Naturally the policies and acts of the English govern-
ment reflected the interests and desires of these two estates.
Naturally, also, both were affected by the course of economic

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 193

development in the American plantations. A part of the
burden of taxation for empire fell on the landlords; they
were likewise concerned about the colonial wool which came
into competition with one of their leading staples and about
colonial produce in general as it poured in increasing
streams into English and Continental markets. Some of
them with startling prescience saw that cheap wheat from
virgin soil might in time ruin British agriculture. Still more
numerous and direct were the points of contact formed by
the merchants with colonial affairs. Besides being active in
all lines of trade and shipping, they advanced large amounts
of capital to promote American enterprises, thus making
every branch of provincial economy an object of solicitude
on their part.
§

Out of the interests of English landlords and merchants,
illuminated no doubt by high visions of empire not foreign
to their advantage, flowed acts of Parliament controlling
the economic undertakings of American colonists and meas-.
ures of administration directed to the same end. These
laws and decisions were not suddenly sprung upon the world
at the accession of George III in 1760. On the contrary,
they were spread over more than a century, beginning with
the rise of the mercantile party under Cromwell; they
crowded the pages of the statute books and the records of
the British colonial offices from the coronation of Charles
II in 1660 to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Far
from being accidents of politics, conceived in the heat of
controversy, they were the matured fruits of a mercantile
theory of state which regarded colonial trade as the prop-
erty of the metropolis, to be monopolized by its citizens and
made subservient in all things to their interests—a theory
which, with modifications here and there, still thrives under
the guise of milder phrases and loftier sentiments.

The laws of the British Parliament giving effect to this
policy fell into certain broad classes. First were the navi-

194 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

gation acts, opening with the famous statute of 1651, which
limited the carrying trade to and from the colonies to
English-built ships, manned mainly by English sailors. Here
was one source of the sea power that defended the empire.
American colonists enjoyed the protection of this power,
profiting, as Englishmen, by the restriction which excluded
alien ships from lucrative business.

A second group of statutes, known as the trade laws,
regulated the exports and imports of the dominions and
plantations. Under the terms of these measures, colonists
had to ship their tobacco, pitch, tar, turpentine, masts, and
other enumerated articles to England; with these exceptions
they could sell their products wherever they could find
buyers. Their importing business was likewise restrained;
commodities of European growth and manufacture, as a
rule, they could buy only through English factors—the idea
being to add to the prosperity of English merchants. A
third sheaf of acts put restrictions on colonial manufactur-
ing; for example, woolen goods and hats could not be made
for the general trade; mills for slitting and rolling iron and
furnaces for making steel were forbidden.

By a fourth group of laws the interests of English cred-
itors were tenderly guarded. With a view to maintaining
a sound medium of exchange and preventing the debt-
burdened colonials from inflating the currency, Parliament
enacted in 1751 a measure prohibiting the issue of paper
money in New England—a proscription later extended to
other colonies. Equally important for the English creditor
was the act of 1752, making the lands, tenements, and slaves
of American debtors subject to levy for the obligations of
their owners, and placing the affidavit of a resident in Eng-
land on the same footing with the testimony of a provincial
in open court in the colonies. The contest between the bond
holder and the debtor had begun in earnest.

The origins of this legislation, or at least the most
salient pieces of it, are more or less clearly revealed in the
records. Certainly, the restriction on American woolen

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY § 195

manufactures flowed from the protests of a competing in-
dustry—English landlords and wool-growers, as well as
merchants and manufacturers, uniting in the protection of
a business which furnished about one-third of England’s
total export trade when the restrictive act was passed in
1699. Parliamentary legislation against colonial hat and
iron industries was likewise the result of specific protests
made by interested parties.

Such also was the origin of the prohibition on colonial
paper money. According to Franklin’s testimony, that irk-
some ban was devised at the request of a handful of cred-
itors. ‘On the slight complaint of a few Virginia mer-
chants,” he lamented, ‘‘nine colonies had been restrained
from making paper money, become absolutely necessary to
their internal commerce, from the constant remittance of
their gold and silver to Britain.” Applying the same argu-
ment to other statutes, he added: ‘The hatters of England
have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favor restrain-
ing that manufacture in America. . . . In the same manner
have a few nail makers and a still smaller body of steel-
makers (perhaps there are not half a dozen of these in
England) prevailed totally to forbid by an act of Parlia-
ment the erecting of slitting mills or steel furnaces in Amer-
ica; that Americans may be obliged to take all their nails
for their buildings and steel for their tools from these
artificers.”’ The measures laying duties on foreign sugar
and molasses were passed on the insistence of British plant-
ers in the West Indies, of whom, it was alleged at the time,
seventy-four were actually sitting in Parliament when the
bills were enacted.

There was accordingly some foundation for the com-
plaint published in the Boston Gazette of April 29, 1765:
‘“‘A colonist cannot make a button, a horseshoe, nor a hob-
nail, but some sooty ironmonger or respectable button-
maker of Britain shall bawl and squall that his honor’s
worship is most egregiously maltreated, injured, cheated,
and robbed by the rascally American republicans.”

196 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Admitting that British imperial legislation was conceived
in the interest of the metropolis, modern mathematicians of
colonial politics make a point of the contention that the
mother country, while restraining colonial enterprise in
some directions, also fostered and stimulated it in others.
The facts are indubitable. From the navigation acts, Amer-
icans derived distinct advantages; producing lumber and
naval stores in huge quantities, they reaped under the cover
of the law the rich benefits of a sweeping monopoly. More-
over, many of their products were given preferential treat-
ment in English markets. For instance, the raising of
tobacco in England was absolutely forbidden on very prac-
tical grounds; the climate and soil were not favorable, the
import tax on it was a great source of revenue to the relief
of lands and houses, and Southern planters relied largely
upon it in discharging their debts to English merchants.
Finally, bounties were paid on several colonial articles—
hemp, masts, and certain naval stores—materials useful to
the sea power by which all British commerce was protected.
Though, in the main, the colonial products paid in English
ports the same duties levied on identical goods from foreign
countries, Adam Smith was right when he said that the
imperial policy of Great Britain, broadly considered, had
been “‘less illiberal and oppressive than that of any other
European nation.” ;

Magnifying this plea, modern calculators have gone to
some pains to show that on the whole American colonists
derived benefits from English policy which greatly out-
weighed their losses from the restraints laid upon them.
For the sake of argument the case may be conceded; it is
simply irrelevant to the uses of history. ‘The origins of the
legislation are clear; and the fact that it restricted American
economic enterprise in many respects is indisputable. As
usually happens in violent economic collisions, the balance
was not turned in 1776 by precise calculations relative to
profits and losses appearing in ledgers and registers, but by
tempers and theories born of antagonism. ‘The mind of

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY § 197

the merchant, or, for that matter, of the most puissant
statesman, is seldom able to forecast in pounds, shillings,
and pence the exact outcome, near or distant, of any great
measure of law or any significant administrative decision.
At any rate, whatever may be the verdict of accountancy,
there can be no doubt that the landlords and merchants of
England, who spread the laws relative to colonial trade
upon the statute books, expected benefit, not injury, from
them, with the reservation that in some close cases the
concerns of one class may have been occasionally bent to
serve the advantage of the other.

§

Whatever their source and purpose, these measures did
not execute themselves. It was necessary to create or adapt
agencies to enforce British law on the one hand and restrain
colonial legislatures on the other. Chief among these insti-
tutions was a central board of administrative control known
by different names at different times. ‘The idea came from
two merchants who had large investments in the colonies
and in overseas trade. It took definite form in 1660 in the
establishment of a committee of the king’s council, charged
with the duty of meeting twice a week to consider petitions,
memorials, and addresses respecting the colonies. Thirty-
six years later a regular body, known as the Board of Trade
and Plantations, was organized for the purpose of drawing
under one high authority every branch of colonial economy
and every transaction of consequence effected by His
Majesty’s governments beyond the sea.

Until the eve of the Revolution, this Board kept all
American affairs drawn tightly within its dragnet, holding
five meetings.a week during most of its career, and, in
periods of relaxation, eight or ten sessions a month. If an
English merchant or manufacturer had a complaint or sug-
gestion to make about the acts of any colonial assembly,
about the doings of any colonial authority, or about meth-

198 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ods of controlling American industry, he could find a sympa-
thetic hearing before the Board of Trade. If any person
thought his property rights in America jeopardized by local
legislation, he could seek relief at the hands of the Board.
In fact all acts of the colonial assemblies, with few excep-
tions, went before it for consideration, and on its recom-
mendation were referred to the Crown for veto or disal-
lowance. If, on the other hand, a colony had a grievance
to air, it could instruct its agents in London to appear
before the Board to present the case.

Thousands of letters preserved in the English archives
bear witness to the range, precision, multiplicity, and
minuteness of the Board’s grasping activities. From its
inception to the accession of George II, it held a tight
rein, scrutinizing colonial economy with an eagle eye and
recommending with firm insistence the annulment of objec-
tionable bills passed by colonial legislatures. While, under
the genial sway of Robert Walpole, whose motto for do-
mestic and foreign statecraft was ‘“‘let sleeping dogs alone,”
there was a period of mild administration, it meant no aban-
donment of established policy. At all events, there opened
after the downfall of Walpole an epoch of thoroughness
which continued until the stormy prelude of the Revolution
was announced. Day after day, year in and year out, this
engine of control kept pounding away on colonial affairs.
Only to the eye of the superficial observer were the guard-
ians of English imperialism asleep.

If the Board of Trade sometimes let an important matter
escape its net, there remained other agencies in England
to which aggrieved suitors could appeal. Any person in
England or in America could carry to London, under ap-
propriate regulations, cases involving acts of colonial legis-
latures and decisions of colonial courts. Serving in the
capacity of an appellate tribunal, the king in council could,
and often did, declare measures passed by local assemblies
null and void ag violating colonial charters or the laws of
England. If the Board of Trade and the appellate courts

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 199

failed to render satisfaction to complainants, there was
always open one more recourse, namely, appeal to the secre-
tary of state in charge of colonial affairs, under different
titles from time to time. In this way issues could be carried
into politics and, if necessary, made the subject of action
in Parliament, where, from time to time, select committees
were created to make inquiries or to listen to the demands
of English merchants and manufacturers for more stringent
restraints on colonial competition. Besides these authori-
ties, treasury and admiralty boards, the attorney-general,
the solicitor-general, and the bishop of London exercised
supervision over provincial matters. |

How far in fact was the British system of restriction and
control actually enforced by the agencies used for the
purpose? A real answer to that question would call for
an exact record of the proportion of exports, imports, and
manufactures effected in violation of law. Obviously, no
such measurement is possible. How much whisky was
consumed in the United States during the year following
the adoption of prohibition? In the absence of statistical
materials, historians of necessity fall back upon relevant
fragments found in colonial papers. On the basis of such
evidence one school of writers concludes that breaches of
the revenue laws in the colonies were no more numerous
or notorious than cases of smuggling in England in the
same age. Another picture represents British colonial
policy utterly defeated by American intrigue and defiance.
Certainly the reports of governors were filled with com-
plaints about violations of law. Even the colonials con-
fessed to many a dereliction. John Adams admitted in
1774 that neither the iron act nor the hat act was obeyed
in Massachusetts. By general agreement, the Molasses
Act of 1733 was openly flouted.

A cloud of witnesses testified to the flagrant conduct of
the Americans in trading with the enemy during the Seven
Years’ War while England and the colonial governments
were engaged in a death grapple with France. When that

200 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

struggle was at its height, Thomas Penn informed William
Pitt that the river at Philadelphia was crowded with ‘‘shal-
lops unloading these illegal cargoes, brought at their return
and cheating the King of his duties, besides carrying provi-
sions and ready money to the Enemy.” Harping upon the
same string, Penn’s governor on the spot reported that “‘a
very great part of the principal merchants” in Philadelphia
were openly trading with the French in the West Indies,
making profits while war was raging.

In Rhode Island the trafic with the enemy was even more
defiant; exasperated by the conduct of Providence mer-
chants and shipmasters, Governor Bernard, of Massachu-
setts, wrote home to the Board of Trade: ‘These practices
will never be put an end to till Rhode Island is reduced to
the subjection of the British empire, of which it is at present
no more a part than the Bahama Islands were when they
were inhabited by Buccaneers.’”’ Nor did New York appear
in any better light. The governor of the province com-
plained that the merchants of the city “consider but their
private profit,” and made special efforts to uproot their
illegal commerce. In fact there is evidence that ships from
nearly every American port were trafficking with the enemy.
In vain did Pitt cry aloud against ‘‘this dangerous and
ignominious trade’’; in vain did officers of the army and
navy inveigh against smugglers, calling them “traitors to
their country.”’

If such was the conduct of the American colonists in
time of war when their own safety like that of Eng-
land was at stake, large inferences can be made with respect
to their activities in time of peace. Certainly, the English
government had every reason for desiring to tighten its
instruments of restraint when George III came to the
throne in 1760; and by attempting to enforce the law, it
was bound to increase the friction already menacing enough
in the ordinary course of events.

§

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 201

In the thousands of complaints, appeals, petitions, me-
morials, rulings, vetoes, decisions, and instructions recorded
in the papers of the Crown agencies for controlling Amer-
ican trade and industry are disclosed the continuous conflict
of English and American forces which hammered and
welded thirteen jealous colonies into a society ready for
revolution. The subjects of controversy were definite and
mainly economic in character. Colonial laws enacted in the
interest of local business enterprises but contrary to English
regulations were often set aside by royal disallowance;
sometimes blanket orders were issued to colonial governors
instructing them not to permit the enactment of any legisla-
tion adverse to English commercial undertakings. Colonial
populism was struck down by vetoes, warnings, and finally
parliamentary action against paper money. To these great
sources of economic antagonism was added _ incessant
wrangling between assemblies and governors over salaries
and allotments to royal officers, over land titles and land
grants, over quitrents due to the Crown or to proprietors,
over bankruptcy acts designed to ease the burdens of Amer-
ican debtors at the expense of English creditors, and over
efforts of the colonists to promote trade at the cost of their
neighbors or of England.

American business and agricultural enterprise was grow-
ing, swelling, beating against the frontiers of English im-
perial control at every point. Colonial assemblies and
English royal officials were serving as the political
knights errant in a great economic struggle that was to
shake a continent.

_. Considered in the light of the English and provincial stat-
utes spread over more than a hundred years, in the light
of the authentic records which tell of the interminable
clashes between province and metropolis, the concept of
the American Revolution as a quarrel caused by a stubborn,
king and obsequious ministers shrinks into a trifling joke.
Long before George III came to his throne, long before
Grenville took direction of affairs, thousands of Americans

202 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

had come into collision with British economic imperialism,
and by the middle of the eighteenth century, far-seeing
men, like Franklin, had discovered the essence of the
conflict.

In a letter written in 1754, six years before the accession
of George III, the philosopher of Poor Richard set forth
the case in terms that admitted of no misinterpretation.
With reference to matters of politics, he declared that royal
governors often came to the New World merely to make
their fortunes; that royal officers in the provinces were fre-
quently men of small estate subservient to the governors
who fed them; and that the Americans in reality bore a
large share of English taxes in the form of enhanced prices
for English goods thrust upon them by monopolistic laws.
Turning to questions of commercial economy, Franklin in-
sisted that the acts of Parliament forbidding Americans to
make certain commodities forced them to purchase such
goods in England, thus pouring more tribute into the Eng-
lish chest; that statutes restraining their trade with foreign
countries compelled them to buy dearer commodities in
England, adding that golden stream to the same treasury;
that, since the Americans were not allowed to stop the im-
portation and consumption of English “‘superfluities,”’ their
‘whole wealth centers finally among the Merchants and
Inhabitants of Britain.”’ In short, in enumerating griev-
ances that had flourished for many a decade, Franklin gave
a clue to the friction which was soon to burst into an
agrarian war.

In a larger sense the American Revolution was merely
one battle in the long political campaign that has been
waged for more than two centuries on this continent. The
institutions of metropolis and colony and the issues of their
dispute were analogous to the institutions and issues that
have figured in every great national crisis from that day
to this. On the side of the mother country, a Crown and
Parliament sought to govern all America somewhat after
the fashion of the President and Congress under the fed-

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 203

eral Constitution of 1787. The central British govern-
ment regulated the interstate and foreign commerce of the
thirteen colonies in the interest of the manufacturing and
commercial classes of England; it directed the disposal of
western lands; it struck down paper money and controlled
the currency; it provided for a common defense and con-
ducted the diplomacy of the continent. With a view to
protecting practical interests, the British Crown and judi-
ciary nullified acts of local legislatures similar in character
to those declared void long afterward by Chief Justice
Marshall. |

On the American side of the colonial conflict, the agent
of local power was the popular assembly which aspired to
sovereignty and independence, placing all rights of person
and property at the disposal of passing majorities. It
authorized the issue of paper money; passed bankruptcy
acts in the interest of debtors; stayed the collection of
overdue obligations; sought to control the sale of western
lands, and assumed the power of regulating local trade and
industry. The British government brought heavy pressure
upon it; an explosion resulted. For a decade the state
legislature was sovereign, and it worked its will in matters
of finance, currency, debts, trade, and property. Then
followed the inevitable reaction in which were restored,
under the egis of the Constitution and under American
leadership, agencies of control and economic policies akin
to those formerly employed by Great Britain. In a word,
the American Revolution was merely one phase of a social
process that began long before the founding of Jamestown
and is not yet finished.

§

At the close of the French and Indian War in 1763,
England found herself in a peculiar state of affairs and
under the direction of new men. George II, with his lum-
bering gait, his German accent, and his passion for Teutonic
comfort, had passed away and the Crown had fallen to

204 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

his young grandson, who gloried in “‘the name of Briton,”
spoke English like a native, cherished his mother’s motto,
“George, be king!” and was prepared for moderate ad-
ventures on his own account. No English sovereign for
more than a hundred years had been in such a favorable
position to uphold royal prerogatives. Unlike the petulant
Stuarts, George III was engaged in no quarrel with the
Commons; unlike William III, he was not primarily inter-
ested in Continental politics; unlike his Hanoverian pre-
decessors, he did not pine for the quiet retreats of his
paternal estates. ‘The last of the Jacobite uprisings in
favor of the Stuarts had been crushed in blood and Prince
Charlie was wasting his life in riotous living on the Con-
tinent. The most intransigent of the old opposition had been
overcome; Tories, as Macaulay said, always eager to pros-
trate themselves, paid homage to George III and were
favorably received. After the two revolutions, there was
no further likelihood of attempts to lay taxes without the
consent of Parliament; and the few thousand landlords and
merchant capitalists who governed England were fairly
content with the best of possible constitutions in the best
of possible worlds. ‘There were lingering remembrances of
ancient differences among them which classified them as
Whigs and Tories, but by the accession of George III, the
prime sources of contention were the spoils of office.
Though most of the landed gentry, except the newly-made
mercantile peers, were in the Tory ranks and the Whigs
found their strength mainly in the towns and among
the middling orders, no great economic issue now sharply
divided them as in the days of the Stuarts.

For nearly half a century the Whigs had held the offices,
drawn the pensions, made the bishops, and monopolized the
revenues of politics. “They had dictated to their sovereigns
and treated their opponents with lofty contempt, spitefully
proscribing all who would not bow the knee. But the long
way had its turning. A host of enemies—some sincere
patriots and others disappointed spoilsmen—was raised up,

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY = 205

and as soon as George III was safely installed, the Whigs
were ousted from power.

Thus a new king and an old party came upon the scene
at a critical juncture when a foreign war and its economic
effects were in progress. ‘Taking note of these facts, one
school of historians has represented the American Revolu-
tion which ensued as the bitter fruit of novel measures
devised by George III and his Tory supporters. ‘The king
himself is put forward to bear most of the blame: ‘The
shame of the darkest hour of England’s history,’ exclaims
Green, “‘lies wholly at his door.” But the modern student,
on his guard against summary judgments, does well to re-
member that the chief authors of this creed were them-
selves either Whigs or Liberals, naturally prone to defend
the conduct of their historic party and to shift the blame
for the disaster to the shoulders of the king and his Tory
adherents.

Their hypothesis does not square with the cardinal facts
in the case. No principles essentially new, except that of
the stamp tax, were applied to the colonies on the accession
of King George, and the stamp tax was quickly abolished
with his approval. No new agencies of control were de-
vised to subdue colonial legislatures. Old laws approved
by both Whigs and Tories were now enforced with more
vigor and old engines of government were worked with
more efficiency to carry into effect established rules. Indeed,
it was the effort to recover lost ground quite as much as
to take new salients that brought on the armed collision.

On none of these things were the Whigs and Tories
divided in principle. No fundamental differences with re-
spect to colonial policies separated the one from the other.
The domestic fortunes of neither of them—places, patron-
age, power, honors, and spoils—depended upon the fate of
measures for ruling the colonies. If Whig merchants de-
rived benefits from restraints on American trade, Tory
landlords found equal advantage in restrictions on Ameri-
can woolen manufactures. To both, imposts on American

206 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tobacco brought a pleasing relief in the form of lighter
taxes on their houses and lands, and projects for shifting
some of the recently acquired war burden to the colonies
were greeted by hearty applause from opposing benches.

_ There was not a single measure designed to tax and con-
trol the trade of the American colonies that was not sup-
ported by Whigs of some school, including leaders high in
that faction. George Grenville, chief author of the forward
policy, had long been associated with the Whigs in office;
whatever his views, he was hardly a Tory of the old per-
suasion. Charles Townshend, who helped to complete the
ruin, was a Whig—a ‘“‘Weathercock Whig’’—but still a
friend of that sect. Lord Rockingham, who, as head of the
government, insisted that Parliament in repealing the Stamp
Act should proclaim its right to make laws binding the
colonies in all matters whatsoever, was a Whig, an out-
standing figure in that group, a patron of Edmund Burke.
Chatham, who often lifted his voice against coercive meas-
ures, Was prime minister when Townshend devised and
pushed through acts taxing the colonists and making
provision for the drastic enforcement of the laws against
smuggling. His friends say that at the time the noble
_ lord was distracted with illness; so charity draws the
curtain. Yet of all the obsequious men who fawned on
George III, none outdid in abasement the Earl of Chatham;
according to Burke, a mere glimpse into the royal closet
intoxicated him. If he thundered against drastic measures
that produced rebellion, he opposed the independence of
America to his dying gasp. Of all the great Whigs, Burke
alone understood America and pursued a consistent course
with respect to American affairs.

It was not the obstinacy of the Tory party, nor the
willfulness of George III, that brought on the American
war for independence. Grenville, who initiated the spe-
cific measures which set fire ‘to the tinder accumulated in
America, was no servile tool of the king. On the contrary,
George III cordially hated that minister, summing up his

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 20?

opinion in the exclamation: “I would rather see the devil
in my closet than Mr. Grenville.’ Nor was the minister
a mere party agent rising to power by the use of spoils and
bribery; as Burke truly said, Grenville won his place not
through the “‘pimping politics’ of the court, but through
conscientious public services, especially in colonial adminis-
tration.

A methodical and parsimonious bureaucrat—a lawyer
who took the parchment view of ofhcial duties—Grenville
thought more could be accomplished for trade by law than
by liberty; and he had the small man’s passion for carrying
theories to a logical conclusion. Seeing the trade acts vio-
lated by American smugglers, he decided to enforce them.
Finding the English treasury loaded with a heavy war debt,
incurred partly in defending the colonies against the French,
he thought it reasonable to transfer to the beneficiaries a
share of the burden. But this philosopher of precision was
not the sole ruler of England; neither was George III in
spite of his pretensions and his bribery of members of
Parliament. ‘The Stamp Act passed both houses ‘‘with less
opposition than a turnpike bill.”

§

Under the direction of the laborious and systematic
Grenville, aided by Townshend, measures of crucial im-
portance, though by no means wholly novel in principle,
emerged from the councils of the British government. On
behalf of English creditors, one act of Parliament made the
prohibition of paper money binding upon the legislatures
of all the colonies. For the benefit of English fur traders
and land speculators, a royal proclamation reserved to the
Crown the ownership and disposal of all lands in the terri-
tory recently wrested from the French and also forbade
fur trading without royal license—a stinging blow to squat-
ter settlers and libertine hunters—even if calculated to
prevent their bloody clashes with the Indians.

208 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

To relieve English taxpayers, elaborate plans for raising
money were incorporated in the Sugar Act of 1764, the title
of the bill expressly declaring that the object was to obtain
revenues in the colonies to be applied toward the expenses
of “protecting and securing them” and preventing smug-
gling. By its terms the old prohibitive rate on molasses
was reduced with a view to yielding returns to the treasury;
specific duties were levied on a number of imports; the list
of enumerated articles which could be sold only in England
was enlarged.

Without respect for the feelings of the colonists, every
conceivable engine was now brought into play to suppress
smuggling. Revenue collectors, officers of the army and
navy, and royal governors were brusquely ordered to do
their full duty. Naval men, none too enamored of judicial
methods at best, were set to work patrolling the coast and
overhauling vessels suspected of neglecting legal precau-
tions; shipowners and masters were placed under closer
scrutiny; rewards were offered to spies and informers; those
who helped to catch smugglers shared in the spoils of the
game. Suddenly and almost without warning, the colonists
found their easy-going ways proscribed and the minions of
the law on their ships, in their warehouses, and even in
their homes, armed with general search warrants.

On top of the Sugar Act. and framed with the same
reference to English taxpayers, came the Stamp Act, sub-
jecting the colonists to burdens similar to those borne by
Englishmen at home. This, too, was a law raising revenues
to be devoted toward the expenses of ‘‘defending, protect-
ing, and securing” the colonies. It was a long measure of
more than sixty sections, dragging within its wide-flung net
almost every kind of legal, commercial, and social operation
that could be discovered by the skillful draftsmen who drew
the bill. Taxes were to be paid on the papers used in legal
transactions, such as deeds, mortgages, and inventories, on
licenses to practice law or sell liquor, on college diplomas,
playing cards, dice, pamphlets, newspapers, calendars, and

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 209

advertisements. [he stamp duties were heavy; penalties
were imposed for violations of the law; and governors were
ordered to be circumspect in enforcing the Act.

Three features of this Act gave it a revolutionary drive.
Unlike most laws relative to trade and shipping, it affected
every section and nearly every class in America. The tax
on sugar and molasses hit the New. England shipper and
rum distiller; the impost on tobacco irked the Virginia
planter; but the Stamp Act struck at every order in society,
making grievances universal. For the first time the thir-
teen colonies were stung into action by one and the same
levy on their purses. In addition to being universal in its
application, the Stamp Act was an innovation. “External
taxes,” that is, customs duties, levied at the ports under
parliamentary orders were not new; but laws taking money
so directly out of provincial pockets had never been passed
before in London. ‘The colonists might well ask whether,
if they acquiesced in this beginning, there would ever be
anend. Last, but not least, the tax fell heavily upon two
classes skilled in controversy, loquacious in expressing them-
selves, and accustomed to fish in troubled waters—lawyers
and editors.

If Grenville and Townshend, laboring under an oil lamp,
had searched a lifetime for a plan better calculated to stir
rebellion in America, they could not have found it. Yet
their colleagues in Parliament were equally innocent; reso-
lutions sanctioning the stamp taxes were carried without
a dissenting voice; the bill itself went through the House of
Commons without causing a ripple of excitement by a vote
of 205 to 49, while in the Lords it was not even necessary
to go through the formality of a count. King George, also
innocent, was temporarily insane at the time; and the bill
was approved by a regency. With similar insouciance
Grenville’s program was fortified by the Mutiny Act of
1765, which provided for dispatching to America all the
troops required to enforce the laws, and by a special Quar-
tering Act, laying down the terms on which the colonists

210 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

were to house, feed, and supply the army sent overseas to
‘protect, defend, and secure.”

In the eyes of its sponsors, this program seemed nothing
more than a reasoned system for maintaining the strength
and integrity of the British empire: the American colonies
enjoyed the protection of the British army and navy, and
it seemed entirely fair. to the ministry in London that they
should help pay the expenses of that service. It was in
the main the logical development of a policy that had been
sanctioned by a century of practice. It was not the outcome
of ‘Tory principles, for Whigs conceived and voted for it.

Indeed, it was so cleverly designed that ‘Tory landlords
and Whig merchants alike rejoiced in the prospects which
it opened. ‘The former were delighted at the thought of
some reduction in taxes. ‘‘I well remember,’’ exclaimed
Edmund Burke years afterward, “that Mr. Townshend, in
a brilliant harangue on this subject, did dazzle them by
playing before their eyes the image of a large revenue to
be raised in America.”’ Besides promising a monetary re-
turn in relief of taxation, the Sugar Act offered direct gains
to the West India planters, of whom there were said to be
three score and more in Parliament. On the other side of
the economic line, British manufacturers and merchants,
whose interests were already well safeguarded in the laws
restricting colonial commerce and industry, naturally ap-
proved the strict enforcement which the contrivances of
Grenville seemed to offer.

If very many people in England, of high or low estate,
entertained strong objections on principle to the new
schemes, they failed to make their views sufficiently vocal
to influence the councils of the government. So the myth
that George III conceived this monumental collection of
restrictive measures and drove it through Parliament must
be dismissed as puerile; the laws were drafted by or
for English landlords and merchant capitalists who as a
rule looked upon the colonies as provinces to be exploited
for the advantage of the metropolis. No doubt, King

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 211

George favored these high-toned schemes and was grieved
when the American populace broke out in defiance of law
and order, but he was not the author and finisher of the
policy that shattered the British empire in America.

§

The peculiar state of American affairs made the recep-
tion of Grenville’s program especially furious. A wide-
spread business depression had just set in. During the
seven years of the French and Indian War, American mer-
chants, planters, and farmers had been unusually prosper-
ous; produce of every kind had brought high prices and the
specie disbursed by the quartermasters had stimulated eco-
nomic activity in every field. The estates acquired by
war profiteers were numerous and large; many merchants
had suddenly risen, complained the lieutenant governor of
New York, “from the lowest rank of the people to con-
siderable fortunes and chiefly by illicit trade in the last
war.’ But in the swift reaction that followed inflated prices
collapsed, business languished, workmen in the towns were
thrown out of employment, farmers and planters, burdened
by falling prices, found the difhculties of securing specie
steadily growing.

By the new imperial program the evils of depression were
aggravated. It struck a blow at the West India trade,
that fruitful source of business and specie. It put a stop
to colonial paper money, thus sharply contracting the cur-
rency. It required the payment of the new taxes in coin
into the British treasury, putting another drain on the de-
pleted resources of the colonists. It harassed American
merchants by irritating searches and seizures, filling them
with uncertainty and dismay, and adding to the confusion of
business. Moreover, all the colonies, not merely the com-
mercial North, were now thrown into distress; all classes,
too, disfranchised and unemployed workmen of the towns
as well as farmers, planters, and merchants. ‘This is sig-

212 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

nificant; it was the workmen of the commercial centers
who furnished the muscle and the courage necessary to
carry the protests of the merchants into the open violence
that astounded the friends of law and order in England
and America and threatened to kindle the flames of war.
In fact, the greeting accorded to the Grenville program
in America astounded the governing classes on both sides
of the water. Before the Sugar Act was passed, Boston
merchants, hearing rumors of the impending legislation,
had organized a committee, presented a memorial to the
legislature, and entered into correspondence with merchants
in other colonies. Likewise in New York, commercial men
had begun to draw together in anticipation of trouble.
When the drastic terms of the Sugar Law and the sweeping
provisions of the Stamp Act became known, the wrath of
the people knew no bounds. Merchants, lawyers, and pub-
lishers held conferences and passed resolutions condemning
British measures and policies. Patriotic women flocked to
associations, pledged themselves not to drink tea, and, be-
sides refusing to purchase British goods, set to work spin-
ning and weaving with greater energy than ever “fromm
sunrise to dark.” The maidens of Providence bound them-
selves to favor no suitors who approved the Stamp Act.
Artisans and laborers, hundreds of them rendered idle
by the business depression, formed themselves into societies
known as “Sons of Liberty.” Feeling their way toward
that political power which was to come in the early nine-
teenth century, they leaped over the boundaries of polite
ceremony. They broke out in rioting in Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Charleston; they pillaged and razed the
offices of stamp agents; they burned stamps in the streets;
they assailed the houses of royal officers; in Boston the
residence of the lieutenant governor was pried open, his
chambers sacked, and his property pitched out into the
streets. In fact, the agitation, contrary to the intent of
the merchants and lawyers, got quite beyond the bounds of
law and order. As Gouverneur Morris remarked, ‘‘the

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 213

heads of the mobility grow dangerous to the gentry, and
how to keep them down is the question.” Indeed, the
conduct of the mechanics and laborers was so lawless that
it is difficult to paint a picture of the scene in tones subdued
enough for modern Sons and Daughters of the Revolution.

In the colonial assemblies, of course, protests against
British policies took on the form of legal arguments and
dignified resolutions. The Virginia House of Burgesses
declared that attempts to tax the people of the Old Do-
minion, except through the local legislature, were “illegal,
unconstitutional, and unjust’’—a declaration supported by
a moving speech of Patrick Henry in which he warned
George III about the fate of Cesar and Charles I, silenc-
ing dissent by the exclamation, “If this be treason, make
the most of it!’’ Not content with formal protests, the
Massachusetts assembly appealed for concerted action, in-
viting the other legislatures to send delegates to a congress
in New York to consult about the circumstances of America
and to consider a general plan for obtaining relief.

With surprising alacrity, nine colonies responded to the
summons, and in the autumn of 1765 the Stamp Act Con-
gress was duly called to order in New York. After the
usual preliminaries, the Congress agreed to a definite pro-
fession of faith embodied in a set of solemn resolutions:
Englishmen cannot be taxed without their consent; the colo-
nists from the nature of things cannot be represented in
Parliament; they can only be taxed by their local legisla-
tures; the Stamp Act tends to subvert their rights and lib-
erties; and other acts imposing duties on the colonists and
regulating their trade are grievous and burdensome. This
creed was then supplemented by an appeal made to the
king and Parliament, begging for the abolition of several
objectionable measures. Going beyond ‘‘humble supplica-
tion,” the insurgents gave an effective drive to their demands
by a well-timed economic stroke—a general boycott of Eng-
lish goods, which had a deadly effect, within a few months
driving the imports rapidly to the lowest point reached in

214 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

thirty years. With a cry of anguish English merchants set
upon Parliament demanding a repeal of the Stamp Act,
which yielded no revenue and ruined their business.

§

While stirring events were shaking the colonies from
New Hampshire to Georgia, a domestic quarrel arose be-
tween George III and his ministry. Far from being a
master in his own house, the king was really a servant.
He had not formulated and forced through the policy of
coercion in America; as far as he understood it, he ap-
proved it; but the policy itself came from his ministers.
As Macaulay justly says, ‘“‘the triumph of the ministers
was complete. The King was almost as much a prisoner
as Charles the First had been when in the Isle of Wight.”
Angered at length by the haughty insolence of Grenville,
George turned to the Whigs for relief, and sanctioned the
creation of a ministry under Lord Rockingham.

On the day of his installation the new premier had to
face rebellion in America and a political insurrection at
home. As Burke said, ‘‘the whole trading interest of this
empire crowded into your lobbies.” The Stamp Act,
coupled with the boycott, had ruined its business, and
sweeping the statute from the books was the only remedy.
Some apostles of high prerogative blustered; but the king,
after expressing his personal dislike for the backward step,
let it be known that men who opposed the repeal did not
speak for him, that he preferred a retreat to the use of
force. So the repeal passed amid the cheers of the lobby-
ists.

And yet, though a victory for the Americans, it was
accompanied, on the insistence of Lord Rockingham, by a
Declaratory Act which expressly rejected as unfounded the
claims of the colonists to the exclusive right of taxing them-
selves, repudiated as utterly null and void their resolutions,
votes, orders, and proceedings denying the authority of

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 215

Parliament in such matters, and proclaimed in language
that admitted of no double interpretation the power of
Parliament to make laws binding the colonies and people of
America “‘in all cases whatsoever.”

After repealing the Stamp Act, Parliament proceeded to
revise the troublesome molasses and sugar laws. It swept
away the wholesale discrimination against the French prod-
uct and established 2 uniform moderate duty of one penny
a gallon on all molasses, British and foreign, imported
into the colonies. While retaining the high rates on foreign
sugar, it lowered the cost of British West India sugar by
striking off the export tax at the local ports. ‘Thus, in ad-
dition to repudiating expressly every claim made by the
colonists under the slogan, ‘‘no taxation without representa-
tion,” Parliament actually passed a bill taxing them with-
out their consent: the new Molasses Act, laying a duty on
British and foreign molasses, was a tariff project designed
to raise revenue.

In reality, therefore, save for the repeal of the Stamp
Act, the Americans won a Pyrrhic victory, but the colonial
merchants, alarmed by the menace to law and order which
their recent protests had let loose, accepted the measures
of Parliament with signs of gratitude. Bells were rung,
cannon fired, banquets held, toasts to the king drunk from
huge bumpers, and professions of profound loyalty made on
every hand. Almost in the same breath, however, the mer-
chants in the commercial colonies began to draw up petitions
to the House of Commons setting forth the grievances
still unheeded. ‘They protested against the duty on mo-
lasses; it reduced the profits of New England distillers.
They objected to the administrative regulations against
smuggling; they were irksome to shippers. They declaimed
against the high duty on foreign sugar; it encouraged illicit
trading and it was bad for business. They mourned over
the prohibition laid on colonial currencies; it brought about
deflation and a great scarcity of money. The Stamp Act,
that had united all colonists and set the lawyers and pub-

216 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lishers in a ferment, had been blotted from the statute books,
some concessions had been made to commerce, but in the
main the forward policy of the Grenville-Townshend school
had not been abandoned.

§

On the contrary, the very next year saw an extension of
that policy. In one of the ever-recurring contests among
English politicians over power, patronage, and royal favors,
the repeal ministry was soon driven from office. After
dragging down the Rockingham Whigs by refusing his sup-
port, William Pitt, delighted as a child by the flattery of
George III, and now elevated to the peerage as the Earl
of Chatham, raised himself again to the head of the gov-
ernment, choosing for the position of chancellor of the
exchequer Charles Townshend who, as everybody knew,
was directly opposed to the old colonial policy of caution
and moderation.

It is true, as already remarked, that Chatham was ill
during this ministry; Whig historians, his ardent apologists,
have always emphasized that indisposition. Still the fact
remains that he assumed responsibility for the direction of
affairs, thereby preventing the formation of an all-Whig
administration, and he put Charles Townshend, “who be-
longed to every party and cared for none,” in a post where
he could give effect to the colonial policies which he was
known to cherish.

The first problem that confronted Townshend on taking
ofice was a deficiency in revenue, for as a concession to
the clamor of the landlords the domestic land tax had been
materially reduced. On all sides it was conceded that some
kind of revenue from the colonies offered the easiest relief
to harassed country gentlemen in England, and ‘Townshend
believed in making the most of the opportunity. Having
learned from experience that ‘internal taxes,” such as the
stamp duties, were out of the question, the eager minister

1a

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 217

cast thoughtfully about for a form of impost acceptable to
the colonists.

One clear way seemed to open, at last. For a long time,
under acts of Parliament, duties had been collected at
American ports on certain goods; and the recent Sugar
Act, which laid a tariff for revenue, had awakened no revo-
lutionary temper in the provinces. Colonial philosophers
had not yet proclaimed such ‘external taxes’? to be flat
violations of their constitutional and natural rights; neither
had they placed these taxes within the mystic category of
imposts banned under the principle of “no taxation with-
out representation.” Fully aware of this situation, Town-
shend came to the conclusion that he was taking due ac-
count of the sentiments of Americans when, in a revenue
law of 1767, he laid duties on lead, glass, tea, and a few
other American imports, and dedicated the proceeds to the
support of government in the colonies. ‘The taxes were
not especially heavy, certainly no more burdensome than
the molasses duties which had followed the repeal of the
Stamp Act. It was true, colonial merchants had protested
against the molasses duties, but their protests had been
couched in respectful tones, showing no threat of rebellion.
So Townshend and Parliament thought that finally a cor-
rect procedure had been found.

If it was constitutional and proper to lay customs duties
on goods imported into the American colonies, it appeared
to be constitutional and proper to make provision for the
collection of the said revenues. So it seemed at least to
the English Parliament. Therefore the Townshend pro-
gram embraced special measures for enforcement. One ot
these placed the collection of colonial imposts in the hands
of British commissioners, appointed by the Crown, resident
in the colonies, paid from the British treasury, and inde-
pendent of local control.

That was ominous enough, but going still further, the
new revenue law added “teeth” to the former measures of
execution. It expressly legalized writs of assistance, by

218 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

authorizing the superior courts of the colonies to issue or-
ders empowering customs officers to enter any house, ware-
house, shop, cellar, or other place in the British colonies or
plantations in America to search for and seize prohibited or
smuggled goods. ‘This promise of vigor was accompanied
by another monitory gesture. As the assembly of New
York had refused to make provision for the king’s soldiers
sent over to aid in law enforcement, Parliament suspended
that legislature until it promised to comply with the obliga-
tions laid upon it.

Such was the body of legislation by which Townshend
and his colleagues in Parliament hoped to raise a re-
spectable revenue iri America and carry into effect the vari-
ous restrictions on colonial trade and industry prescribed
by nearly a hundred statutes spread over the books all the
way back to the age of Cromwell. If the chancellor had
any inkling of the havoc that his laws would play he gave
no sign; he was not fated to live to see the mischief that
flowed from his actions.

Among the measures of Townshend’s program, none
was more odious than the express sanction given to writs
of assistance. ‘There was nothing novel, of course, about
the summary process of search and seizure, for it had long
been used in England, but it made trouble in America,
especially in Massachusetts. In fact, the employment of
the famous judicial order there in 1755 in connection with
illicit trade had raised a strong opposition; and it became
a subject of a fierce controversy six years later when an
application was made to a Massachusetts court for the writ
‘‘as usual.”

On that occasion James Otis opposed the project in an
impassioned speech of five hours duration. He denounced
the practice as an exercise of that arbitrary power which
had cost one king his head and another his throne; and
condemned it as a tyrant’s device which placed the liberty
and property of every person in the hands of a petty officer
moved by malice as much as zeal for the law. ‘Though Otis

CLASH OF ‘METROPOLIS: AND COLONY 219

had no objection to special writs to search particular places,
issued on oath, his wrath against the general writ knew
no bounds. ‘‘What a scene,” he exclaimed, ‘“‘does this
open! Every man, prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or
wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor’s house,
may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-
defense; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another until
society is involved in tumult and blood.” No careful hand
made a verbatim record of this eloquent address, but the
fragments that survive explain why every man who heard
it went away ready to take up arms against writs of assist-
ance. Such was the American attitude toward the hated
legal document which Townshend proposed to put in the
hands of royal customs officers engaged in executing the
provisions of British colonial policy.

Whatever the colonists may have thought of Town-
shend’s program, it was in fact, like the policy of Gren-
ville, a perfect mirror of the mind of the English governing
classes. For this we have the high authority of Edmund
Burke. In his speech on American taxation, the Irish
orator later reviewed the scene to which he had been a
witness. He told his auditors that to please universally
was the object of Townshend’s life. ‘To render the tax
palatable to the partisans of American revenue, he had a
preamble stating the necessity of such a revenue. To close
with the American distinction, this revenue was external,
or port duty; but again to soften it to the other party it
was a duty of supply. To gratify the colonists, it was laid
on British manufactures; to satisfy the merchants of
Britain the duty was trivial and (except that on tea which
touched only the devoted East India Company) on none of
the grand objects of commerce. To counterwork the
American contraband, the duty on tea was reduced from
a shilling to three pence. But to secure the favor of those
who would tax America, the scene of collection was changed
and with the rest it was levied in the colonies. . . . The
original plan of the duties and the mode of executing that

220 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

plan, both arose singly and solely from a love of our
applause. He was truly the child of the House. He never
thought, did, or said anything but with a view to you. He
every day adapted himself to your disposition; and ad-
justed himself before it as at a looking-glass.”

s

As soon as the Townshend program took the form of
reality in America in the shape of an army of customs
officers supported by British regulars and a fleet of revenue
cutters, the war of American independence opened, not, of
course, with all the panoply of the state, but in the guise
of unashamed, flagrant, and determined resistance to law.
In a few months a long roll of riotous deeds was registered.
An informer who told on Boston smugglers was tarred,
feathered, and dragged through the streets of the city;
three informers were furnished a dose of the same medi-
cine in New York; the tide waiter at Providence was beaten
and given a coat of tar and feathers; a revenue sloop was
boarded, smashed, and burnt by a Newport mob because
it brought into port two vessels accused of smuggling; when
the royal officers in Philadelphia seized fifty pipes of Ma-
deira wine on which duties had not been paid, a mob as-
saulted them and stole the sequestered goods.

Every few days Boston was filled with alarm over the
landing of goods in defiance of law, over forcible seizures
by revenue authorities, and over forcible recaptures accom-
panied by assaults on officers. In June, 1768, when John
Hancock’s sloop Liberty reached Boston with a cargo of
wine, temper was high. ‘The collector who went on board
to enforce the law was pitched into the cabin of the ship
and most of the wine was taken off in spite of his cries.
When the customs board ordered the seizure of the vessel,
a mob replied by attacking the revenue officers and stoning
their houses. When regulars were brought into the city to
restore order, the remedy proved to be worse than the

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 221

disease. Even school children now emulated their elders by
jeering soldiers and officers; indeed, one of the first Ameri-
cans killed in the conflict was a school boy shot by an in-
former who resented childish ridicule.

This affair was shortly followed by the ‘‘Boston Mas-
sacre’’ of March, 1770, starting in comedy as some youths
threw snowballs and stones at a small body of British
regulars and ending in tragedy with the killing and wound-
ing of several citizens. ‘“[he Boston people are run mad,”
lamented the governor. ‘The frenzy was not higher when
they banished my pious great-grandmother, when they
hanged the Quakers, when they afterwards hanged the poor
innocent witches.’ In other colonies the storm also raged.
Two years after the “Massacre,” John Brown, of Provi-
dence, the richest merchant in the town, at the head of an
armed mob, boarded the revenue cutter, Gaspee, which had
run ashore while chasing a smuggler; after seizing the crew,
the rioters set the ship on fire.

During these operations in defiance of the law, mer-
chants were organizing non-importation associations and
bringing a stringent boycott to bear on the English govern-
ment. Once more women came to the rescue by denying
themselves English goods and by working hard with their
wheels and looms to supply the deficiency. ‘‘The female
spinners kept on spinning six days of the week,” caustically
remarked a high Tory, ‘‘and on the seventh the Parsons
took their turns and spun out their prayers and sermons to
the long thread of politics.” Townshend had aroused pas-
sions that were soon to challenge British supremacy on the
field of battle.

While radicals were agitating, merchants drawing up
resolutions, and women spinning, colonial assemblies were
learning the lessons of codperation. In 1768 the lower
house in Massachusetts, under the shrewd direction of Sam
Adams, addressed an appeal for union, in the form of a
circular letter, to the legislatures of the other colonies. This
letter, cautiously phrased, described the state of affairs in

222 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Massachusetts, condemned the British program, expressed
the opinion that Parliament could not lay any duties in
America for the sole purpose of raising revenue,’ and de-
clared that the colonies from the nature of things could
not be represented in Parliament.

In the rhetoric of humble propriety, the letter submitted
to consideration the question whether any people could be
free so long as they were subjected to governors and judges
appointed by the Crown. Finally notice was taken of the
hardships occasioned by the enforcement of the Quartering
Act and the conduct of the commissioners of the customs.
Displaying a restraint far beyond the wont of Adams, the
concluding paragraph expressed a ‘“‘firm confidence in the
King, our common head and father,” and confessed the be-
lief that ‘‘united and dutiful supplications” would meet with
his favor and acceptance. ‘Though the letter was moderate
to the point of servility, the governor of Massachusetts
ordered the house to rescind it, and on meeting refusal he
dissolved the General Court. The appeal had gone forth.
The assemblies of Maryland, Georgia, and South Carolina
endorsed the sentiments of the circular, and were promptly
dissolved for their defiance.

In the same spirit of determination, the Virginia House
of Burgesses, aroused by a resolution of Parliament de-
manding that persons guilty of disorder in the colonies be
transported to England for trial, filed its declaration of
principles in May, 1769. It announced that the sole right
of levying taxes was vested in the legislature of the prov-
ince and protested against subjecting Americans to Eng-
lish tribunals across the sea. The tone of the resolutions
was firm, but the king was assured of “our inviolable at-
tachment to his sacred person and government.”

§

While, in the light of later events, the protesting and
rioting in America were full of warning, the British gov-

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 223

ernment was apparently not alarmed at the time. All
through the tempest political maneuvering continued in
London on conventional lines; officers were made and un-
made with little reference to colonial affairs, and out of the
customary intriguing, Lord North, after serving in the
treasury and later in the exchequer, rose to the post of
prime minister, opening in 1770 a term that was to last
for twelve years. Under his leadership, the English ruling
classes went on the even tenor of their way unconscious of
impending calamity. Although in April, 1770, Parliament
repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea,
it took this step, if the ministry must be believed, not as a
concession to Americans, but because taxes on British manu-
factures were “‘preposterous.’’ As a matter of fact, good
crops in England and war on the Continent filled the sails
of English trade with the winds of prosperity so that the
boycott in America, unlike the revolt in the days of the
Stamp Act, brought no one to his knees. While admitting
that certain vocal grievances existed in the provinces, Lord
North went blandly on his course without losing any sleep
over the news from the royal governors or the protests of
provincial agents in London.

Indeed, North was so little troubled by events in the
colonies that he sponsored a law bound to make still more
mischief than the Townshend duties or the Stamp Act. At
this juncture in commercial affairs, the East India Com-
pany had fallen into financial difficulties; famines had deci-
mated its business and rapacious directors had impoverished
its treasury by declaring high dividends. In 1772 it was
marching swiftly in the direction of bankruptcy, driving a
horde of politicians and capitalists to the brink of ruin.
On an appeal from the Company, Parliament came to its
aid, making it a huge loan at a low rate of interest and
transferring many of its high prerogatives in India to the
British Crown. During the course of the settlement, the
government cast about for a way of unloading a surplus
of seventeen: million pounds of tea which the corporation

224 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

nad on hand, and naturally America was remembered in
this relation.

The result was the Tea Act of 1773. Under this meas-
ure the Company was given a refund of the duties paid on
any tea imported into England and afterwards transshipped
to the colonies. Then an additional favor was conferred on
the Company. Hitherto it had sold tea at public auction
in England to merchants who exported it to America for
sale. Contrary to that practice, the new Tea Act, author-
ized the corporation to go into business on its own account
—to export tea in its own ships and to sell tea directly
through its own agencies in the colonies. ‘To merchants in
America this was a stunning blow—a blow furnishing a
precedent to the American Standard Oil Company which, a
century later, flung out its branches in every direction to
the ruin of independent producers and retailers.

By the Tea Act a path was cut directly from the producer
to the consumer. Before it was passed, English tea mer-
chants had purchased their stocks from the Company in
England; American importers had bought from the Eng-
lish jobbers; and colonial retailers had been supplied by
the local importers, thus compelling the consumers in the
provinces to pay four profits. Under the new Tea Act they
were to have the privilege of buying tea directly from the
Company without the intervention of middlemen. So in
spite of small duties levied under the remaining shreds of
the Townshend revenue act, tea could now be sold in Amer-
ica lawfully by the Company at a price far below that
charged by American merchants who bought their stocks
legally in London or even smuggled them through from
Holland. |
_ Naturally the news of this Tea Act spread consternation
among American business men; for the profits of a lucrative
trade were about to be swept away by the stroke of a pen
and the agents of a powerful monopoly authorized to oper-
ate directly on American soil. ‘The immediate menace was
great; if this practice was extended, American enterprise

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 225

could be utterly destroyed in the interest of British concerns.
“Would not the opening of an East-India House in Amer-
ica encourage all the great Companies in Great Britain to
do the same ?”’ exclaimed a New York protestant. “If so,
have we a single chance of being anything but Hewers of
Wood and Drawers of Water to them?”

There was the whole colonial case in a nutshell: tea
stocks on hand were struck down in value below cost;
profits were wiped out; and the prospect was opened of
making America a mere tributary to the capitalist system
of Great Britain. For a young and energetic people, full
of spirit, with the wide sea before them and immense
natural resources at their command, such a position of
provincial subordination, diverting riches and power to
London, was unbearable, impossible.

Swift was the answer of the American merchants in the
port towns to the Tea Act. As soon as the first cargoes
arrived in the harbor of Boston, a mass meeting, held in
the Old South Meeting House, unanimously resolved that
the tea should be sent back without being honored by the
payment of duty. Hearing of this action, the royal gov-
ernor ordered the assembly of objectors to disperse, only
to have his order greeted with loud and prolonged hissing.
For several days negotiations were carried on between the
spokesmen of the popular conference and the agents of the
government.

At last, on the evening of the twentieth day, the patience
of the crowd was at an end; as night fell upon the town, —
Sam Adams rose in the church and said: ‘This meeting
can do nothing more to save the country.’”” Whether or not
this was the signal for direct action remains a mystery, but
certainly in a few minutes a huge mob in the disguise of
Indians swept down to the docks, boarded the tea ships,
and dumped £18,000 worth of property into the water.
Words had borne fruit in deeds. Who composed this law-
less tea party is not yet settled, but the assiduous searches
of A. M. Schlesinger reveal merchants toiling ‘side by side

226 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with carpenters, masons, farmers, blacksmiths, and _ bar-
bers.”

In other cities the tempest over the Tea Act broke out
in startling tones. Rioters paraded the streets of Ports-
mouth, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, refraining
from open violence only because the customs officers and
consignees of tea thought discretion the better part of
valor; and Annapolis ‘‘out Bostoned Boston.’”’ When the
Peggy Stewart arrived with a cargo of tea, a local mass
meeting was held and it was solemnly resolved that the
goods should not be landed.

Harder and harder blew the storm until radical elements
got possession of the assembly, demanding that ship and
cargo be burnt. By a show of force, the owners of the
brig, James Dick and his son-in-law, Anthony Stewart, im-
porters already in bad odor with local patriots, were now
compelled to consent to the sacrifice of their property—as
the price of escaping worse damage, including the destruc-
tion of Stewart’s home, which was worth more than the
ship. So, in the presence of a great throng, the Peggy Stew-
art and the tea were sent up in one grand sky-roaring flame.
Evidently affairs in America had passed beyond the: realm
of parlor patriotism.

As soon as the report of the Boston tea party reached
London, the British government resolved upon enforcing
respect for law in Massachusetts, where the property of a
great trading company had been destroyed. Until that
time it had endured with considerable patience the course
of disorder. To give a poor customs officer a coat of tar
and feathers was one thing; to destroy £18,000 worth of
tea belonging to the most powerful corporation operating
in the British Empire and in British politics was something
quite different. So, at least, it was regarded by the ministry
of Lord North.

Accordingly, Parliament by sweeping majorities passed
five “intolerable acts’? aimed at curing unrest in America.
The port of Boston was absolutely sealed to all outside

CLASH OF METROPOLIS AND COLONY 227

commerce; the old charter granted in 1691 was revoked
and town meetings were prohibited except when authorized
by the governor; persons accused of murder in connection
with law enforcement were to be transferred to England
for trial; the quartering of troops in Massachusetts towns
was legalized. The fifth measure, which especially incensed
the Puritans—the Quebec Act—extended the boundaries of
that province to the Ohio River in spite of the claims of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, and granted tol-
eration to Catholics in Canada.

Administrative measures supplemented the laws. Gen-
eral Gage, head of the armed forces in the provinces, was
appointed governor of Massachusetts; reinforcements were
hurried to the point of disaffection; and the majesty of the
law was to be vindicated by strong medicine administered
to “the rebels,’’ as George III now called his subjects in
America. On the part of the British cabinet the task was
undertaken with a light heart, for it had been informed by
Hutchinson, born and bred in Massachusetts, that a few
soldiers would awe the populace into submission and by
General Gage that four regiments would be “‘sufficient to
prevent any disturbance.’”’ With their usual prescience mili-
tary authorities and technical experts spoke of the colonials
in terms of contempt and prepared to rush into the fray
with their customary levity. Since General Wolfe, the
hero of Quebec, had declared that “‘the Americans are in
general the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs that
you can conceive,” it seemed reasonable to English officers
to suppose that a little cold steel would quickly reduce such
persons to order.

CHAPTER VI

Independence and Civil Conflict
() N Monday, May 30, 1774, Nicholas Cresswell, the

Tory diarist then traveling in Virginia, entered in
his journal: ‘‘Dined at Colonel Harrison’s. Noth-
ing talked of but the blockade of Boston Harbour. ‘The peo-
ple seem much exasperated at the proceedings of the Minis-
try and talk as if they were determined to dispute the mat-
ter with the sword.” The news of the Intolerable Acts had
arrived. It had been made evident that there was to be no
repetition of the Stamp Act episode: protest, boycott, and
resistance followed by a surrender on the part of Parlia-
ment; that the government of Great Britain would meet in-
surgency with coercion, riots with a demonstration of mili-
tary force. Up to this point the recent American agitation
had been local and fitful, carried on by town and county
committees and provincial conventions. Now it took on a
national character.
On June 17, the Massachusetts assembly, inspired by
Samuel Adams, invited all the other colonies to send dele-

gates to a grand continental convention. The response was
228

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 229

impressive. In a hurried and irregular fashion representa-
tives were chosen by colonial assemblies or at mass meetings
dominated by fearless leaders, every colony, except Georgia,
where the royal governor blocked the selection of delegates,
replying promptly to the call from Boston. ‘‘The New
Englanders,” lamented the choleric Cresswell, ‘‘by their
canting, whining, insinuating tricks have persuaded the rest
of the colonies that the Government is going to make abso-
lute slaves of them. ‘This I believe never was intended, but
the Presbyterian rascals have had address sufficient to make
the other colonies come into their scheme.” Such was the
Tory’s view of things.

When the first Continental Congress assembled in Car-
penter’s Hall in Philadelphia, it was found that many of
the ablest men of America had been sent to speak for the
discontented groups in the colonies. Some were bold:
Gadsden of South Carolina was for an immediate attack on
General Gage in Boston. Others were cautious: Dickin-
son of Pennsylvania thought that a respectful petition to
the king would restore harmony; Washington, like Crom-
well long before him, apparently awaited the decree of
Providence. “One third Whig; another Tory; the rest
mongrel,” wrote John Adams. Nevertheless, the delegates
agreed upon a declaration of American rights setting forth
the grievances and principles of the colonists in clear yet
dignified language. This manifesto they supplemented by
an address to the king and another to the people of Eng-
land, disclaiming the idea of independence while vigorously
criticizing the policies pursued by the British government.

Advancing beyond the language of declaration and pe-
tition, the Congress then approved the action of Massachu-
setts in resisting British measures and promised the united
support of the sister colonies—an ominous gesture but
platonic rather than a stroke of power. Aware that some-
thing more than rhetoric was required by the occasion, the
radicals in the Congress who voted for this resolution de-
manded coercive measures of action competent to bring the

230 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

British ministry to a surrender. After a heated debate,
the Congress decided to paralyze British commerce until
its demands were conceded; it resolved to stop the importa-
tion of British goods into America and to compel obedience
to its decree by the establishment of committees of ‘“‘safety
and inspection’”’ elected at the polls.

This was an ultimatum to the wavering masses; a test
of allegiance to the American cause. Men who had been
silent in the midst of the popular clamor or indifferent to
the outcome could no longer avoid making a choice seen
of all: they were either for or against the non-importation
act; they either bought British goods or they did not; they
were either with the radicals or against them. They had
to choose whom they would serve, and choose quickly, for
no time was allowed for parleys. With breath-taking
swiftness local committees were formed to enforce the non-
importation agreement and stern measures were employed
against those who sold or consumed British goods. Recal-
citrant citizens were treated to tar and feathers while the
champions of non-importation were hailed as_ heroes.
Subscriptions were taken for the relief of the people of
Boston.

Up and down the country companies of militiamen began
to drill and mass meetings were held to endorse the actions
of the Congress. ‘‘The King is openly cursed,” recorded
Cresswell, ‘“‘and his authority set at defiance. In short,
everything is ripe for rebellion.” Having raised the stand-
ard of revolt, the Congress took precautions for the
future. Before adjourning it provided that a second Con-
gress should meet the following May, if necessary.

If the colonists were firm, the British ministry was
firmer. Petitions and declarations by the Congress encoun-
tered stony hearts in Westminster. In vain did Chatham
and Burke urge the repeal of the laws that had roused
the ire of Americans. In vain was a motion pressed and
sustained by the eloquence of Chatham in favor of remov-
ing the king’s troops from Boston. ‘Every motive of jus-

INDEPENDENCE AND, GIVIL CONFLICT. 231

tice and of policy, of dignity and of prudence,” warned the
orator in his plea before the House of Lords, ‘‘urges you
to allay the ferment in America, by a removal of your
troops from Boston, by a repeal of your acts of Parlia-
ment, and by a display of amicable disposition towards your
colonies. On the other hand, every danger and every
hazard impend to deter you from perseverance in your pres-
ent ruinous course. Foreign war hanging over your heads
by a slight and brittle thread: France and Spain watching
your conduct and waiting for the maturity of your errors;
with a vigilant eye to America and the temper of your
colonies.”’

But all such advice left Lord North perfectly cold; he
would not yield to the demands. The best that he would
offer was a set of conciliatory resolutions promising to re-
lieve from parliamentary taxation any colony that would
assume its share of imperial defense and make provision for
the support of local officers of the Crown. Even this
“Olive Branch” he supplemented by a resolution that as-
sured the king of codperation in suppressing the rebellion
and by the Restraining Act of March 30, 1775, which was
intended in effect to destroy the entire sea-borne trade of
New England.

Tension between the metropolis and the colonies had
now reached the danger point. Only a little act of violence
was necessary to set the continent on fire; and the way for
that fateful event was prepared by General Gage, in com-
mand of the British regulars in Boston. His superiors, the
British ministers, chafing because the presence of soldiers
had not awed the colonists into submission, were inclined
to censure him for his inertia. At all events, for some rea-
son, not very clear, Gage resolved upon a show of authority.

Hearing that the colonists had collected military stores
at Concord, on April 19, 1775, he dispatched a small force
to seize their supplies. News of the movement of troops,
carried by Paul Revere and Rufus Dawes, spread like wild-
fire through the countryside, bringing swarms of minute

232 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

men to the scene of action. At Lexington, on the road to
Concord, the British encountered a small band of militia-
men drawn up on the green, and an order to disperse was
followed by firing. Whose hand kindled the flame is to
this hour one of the mysteries of military romance. The
Americans placed the responsibility upon Major Pitcairn
commanding the regulars; the British laid the act at the
door of the militiamen. ‘The testimony is conflicting and
historians still debate the question of the ‘‘war guilt.” But
the fact, stark and fateful, stands out against the fair spring
morning at Lexington; the contest was then and there
transferred from the forum to the battlefield.

Lord North’s ministry now openly accepted the challenge.
King George issued a proclamation against the rebels.
He declared that the colonists, ‘“‘misled by dangerous and
ill-designing men,” were in a state of rebellion; he ordered
the civil and military authorities to bring “‘the traitors’’ to
justice; and he threatened with “‘condign punishment the
authors, perpetrators, and abettors of such traitorous de-
signs.’ Later in the year, Parliament passed a sweeping
act cutting off trade and intercourse with America. Hope
of conciliation was not yet dead but it was rapidly fading
in the minds of American leaders.

§

The second Continental Congress, which met at Phila-
delphia in May, 1775, soon took the path that led to
revolution. It rejected Lord North’s offer of peace on
the ground that the right of Parliament to tax was not
renounced or offending acts repealed. While it petitioned
the king again for a redress of grievances, it turned reso-
lutely to the defense of American claims with all the
weapons at hand. Fate decreed that this remarkable as-
sembly should direct the storm for many years, and that all

the colonies should afford high talent for its councils. In >
the long course of its sessions it had among its members

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT = 233

nearly every outstanding leader of the Revolution: such as
Washington, Jefferson, Wythe, Harrison, the Lees from
Virginia; Samuel and John Adams, Gerry and Hancock of
Massachusetts; Franklin and Morris of Pennsylvania;
Read and Rodney of Delaware; Roger Sherman and Oliver
Wolcott of Connecticut.

Its delegates were nearly all citizens of substance and
affairs. Of the fifty-six that signed the Declaration of
Independence, eight were merchants, six were physicians,
five were farmers, and twenty-five were lawyers—members
of that learned and contentious profession against which
Burke had warned his countrymen. Most of them were
tutored in the arts of local politics; many had served in
colonial legislatures; a majority had taken an active part
in agitations against British policy; nearly all were plain
civilians with natural talents for political management.
Among them there was no restless son of an ancient family,
like Julius Cesar, eager for adventure in unsettled times;
no zealot like Oliver Cromwell, waiting to direct the storm
in field and forum; no professional soldier, like Bonaparte,
watching for a chance to ride into power; no demagogue,
like Danton, marshaling the proletariat against his col-
leagues.

From beginning to end, the spirit of the Congress was
civic rather than martial. Every debate was haunted by a
dread of military power, the delegates seeming to fear a
triumphant American army almost as much as they did the
soldiers of George III. At no time did a dictator attempt
to seize the helm of the government. Washington might
have made himself master of the scene with ease, but the
operation was foreign to the spirit of that Virginia gentle-
man. When, upon occasion, sovereign powers were con-
ferred upon him by the Congress, he always returned them
in due time unsullied by personal ambitions. Even in the
most crucial hour there arose in the Congress no tyrannical
committee of public safety such as ruled France in the dark-
est days of her revolution.

234 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Nor were the proceedings of the Congress especially
dramatic. Usually there were not more than twenty or
thirty members in attendance; and in such an assembly the
stormy eloquence of a Marat would have been comic.
Although the lawyers present consumed weeks and months
in displaying their logical capacities, the Congress was, on
the whole, more like a village debating society than the
Convention which carried France through the Reign of
Terror. Moreover, it met in the little town of Philadelphia,
with its twenty thousand inhabitants dominated by Quakers,
not in a Paris crowded by half a million people—soldiers,
priests, noblemen, merchants, artisans, raging Amazons,
and passionate radicals. When, in the sultry days of 1776,
it discussed the Declaration of Independence, no throngs
pressed into the galleries to intimidate the wavering, no
tumultuous mob stormed the doors clamoring for a de-
cision. As a rule its transactions had the air of timidity
and negotiation instead of resolution and mastery, disputes,
vacillation, and delays marking its operations from session
to session.

Its incompetence was not all due, however, as its critics
have alleged, to mere perversity of human nature. ‘The
members of the Congress labored under the gravest of
difficulties. Unlike the party of Cromwell or the national
assembly of France, they could not take over an adminis-
trative machine that was already organized and working.
Exactly the opposite was true; they had to create every-
thing national out of a void—a government, a treasury, an
army, even a bookkeeping system, and agencies for buying
supplies.

Unlike the English and French revolutionists, they had
no centuries of national tradition behind them—no nation-
wide class informed by a historic solidarity of interests to
which they could appeal for support with assurance. In-
stead, they were largely dependent from the first day to
the last upon the good graces of state assemblies and gov-
ernors for troops, money, supplies, and the enforcement of

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 235

their resolutions. And in the best of times the states were
in arrears on everything; almost on the eve of Yorktown,
Washington recorded that hardly one had put one-eighth of
its quota of men at the service of the Revolution.

To make matters worse, the Congress itself was beset
by the sectional jealousies which divided the states. Every-
thing had to be viewed with an eye to its effect on the com-
mercial or the planting interests. Among the members was
no dominant majority invincibly united for a specific end,
no single person moved to grasp large powers and enforce
by sheer strength of will the acts of the Congress. All
business had to be done by committees and on every im-
portant committee each state usually had at least one
member.

Administration as well as legislation was controlled by
commissions: foreign affairs, finance, supplies, and other
matters of prime significance were entrusted to boards.
Even the treasury was supervised by a committee until near
the end of the struggle, when dire necessity forced the
appointment of Robert Morris as superintendent of finance.
Yet this is the body that gave voice to the national revolu-
tionary movement, directed war, conducted foreign rela-
tions, made treaties, won independence, created a govern-
ment, and nourished the germs of American nationality.

§

In view of the dogged jealousy which plagued the Con-
gress, it was surprising that the members were able to agree
upon entrusting the armed forces to the command of a
single general. Here, perhaps, the divine winds of fortune
favored them. Necessity hurried them into a decision and
by one of the strangest ironies of history sectional discords
then contributed to unity. When the second Congress met,
on May 10, 1775, blows had already been struck at Lex-
ington and Concord and thousands of militiamen had
poured into the region around Boston—soldiers without

236 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

supplies or organization. Confronted by the task of feed-
ing and paying them, the Massachusetts assembly turned
to the Congress for help. According to John Adams, every
post brought letters from friends “urging in pathetic terms
the impossibility of keeping their men together without the
assistance of Congress.”

But when he asked for help, Adams encountered jealousy
at the very outset. More than that, there were some
people unkind enough to hint that Massachusetts, having
started the war, was trying to share the expenses with her
neighbors. At all events, the price of united action was
the choice of a Virginia soldier, George Washington, as
the Commander-in-chief. Thus the hero of the Revolution,
a man beyond question nobly qualified for the task of lead-
ership, owed his selection partly to a political trade. With
a certain dry humor, Washington, who was in Congress
when the transaction took place, noted that his appointment
was due to “the partiality of Congress joined to a political
motive.”

It was only by exercising the same fine arts of negotiation
that the advocates of independence were able to overcome
local jealousies and conservative fears and at length bring
a majority of the delegates into line for the momentous
decision of July 2, 1776. In fact, the idea of breaking
definitely with the mother country was slow in taking form
and slow in winning its way among the people. Washing-
ton and Franklin vowed that before the battle of Lexington
no one had thought of revolutionary action. Even Sam
Adams, though charged by the Tories with secretly harbor-
ing that motive from the beginning, was careful to conceal
his opinion if he had the goal of separation always before
him.

Months after the first blood was shed, strong men con-
tinued to express their affection for England and to hope
for a peaceful way out of the prolonged deadlock. ‘Never
let us lose out of sight that our interest lies in a perpetual
connection with our mother country,” urged a preacher of

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 237

Swiss origin in his sermon before the Georgia provincial
congress. ‘‘Look ye!’ roared John Dickinson at John
Adams, “‘if you don’t concur with us in our pacific system,
I and a number of us will break off from you in New Eng-
land and will carry on the opposition by ourselves in our
own way.”

Against this spirit of conciliation, however, opinions and
facts made a steady headway in the direction of ultimate
independence. The idea was advanced by discussions in
newspapers and broadsides, broached in sermons, argued in
taverns, covertly mentioned by the extremists in the pro-
vincial assemblies. ‘‘When one form of government is
found by the majority,” hinted the President of Harvard
in a sermon before the local assembly of Massachusetts, on
May 31, 1775, ‘not to answer the grand purpose in any
tolerable degree, they may by common consent put an end
to it and set up another.” In the highways and byways,
this familiar sentiment gathered from the writings of John
Locke gradually became the chief topic of conversation and
debate. From the thought it was but a step to action, and
events were daily, hourly, hastening the movement. War
was at hand. Royal governors and their retinues were
fleeing from their capitals. Revolutionary committees
were taking the places of the old agencies of authority in
all the colonies—office holders, who had lived by the British
Empire, showing a strange unwillingness to die by it at
their posts.

The air was vibrant in the opening days of 1776 when
Thomas Paine sent forth from the press the first of his
powerful pamphlets, Common sense, calling for absolute
independence without fear and without apologies. Casting
off the language of loyalty and humility in which the Amer-
icans had framed their petitions to the throne, brushing
aside the lawyers’ pleas for the chartered rights of Eng-
lishmen, Paine boldly challenged the king, the British con-
stitution, and the policies of the British government.

In serried array he presented political and economic ar-

238 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

guments for separation: the rights of human nature are
broad enough and firm enough to support the American
cause; the blood of the slain calls for separation; it is not
the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but
a continent; it is not a concern of the day but of all posterity
to the end of time. ‘“‘O! ye that love mankind! Ye that
dare to oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand
forth!” So ran the plea. ‘Sound doctrine and unanswer-
able reasons!” exclaimed Washington when he read it.
Soon a hundred thousand copies were circulating to the
uttermost parts of the colonies, everywhere giving heart to
the timid and quickening the intrepid to action.

In the provincial assemblies the cause was also making
headway. Early in that year Massachusetts informed her
agents at Philadelphia that independence would be welcome.
On April 13, North Carolina—the “‘first,” says Allan Nev-
ins, ‘‘to give explicit approval’’—told her delegates that
they might concur with their colleagues in separating from
Great Britain. About a month later, Virginia clearly in-
structed her representatives in the Congress to propose
independence and give their assent to that daring act.
Although New York:had resolved that the people were not
ready for revolution, although Maryland still hoped for a
happy reunion with Britain, the cords of loyalty were snap-
ping fast. Several colonies had already cast off British
authority in fact by setting up new governments of their
own; General Gage had been compelled to evacuate Boston;
and Washington was moving on New York. The more
impatient members of the Congress openly declared that the
hour had come for separation. ‘Is not America already
independent? Why not then declare it?” asked Samuel
Adams.

On June 7, Richard Henry Lee, in the name of the Vir-
ginia delegation, moved that ‘‘these united colonies are
and of right ought to be free and independent states.” In
response a committee was chosen to drait the state paper
proclaiming the Revolution and stating the reasons for that

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 239

momentous stroke. ‘Thomas Jefferson, whose facility of
expression was known to his colleagues, was made chairman
and assigned the delicate task of framing the document.
For eighteen days he worked at it, cutting, polishing, and
balancing.

When at last the great oration was finished, several
suggestions by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were
incorporated and the instrument was laid before the Con-
gress, where a caustic debate followed. While Jefferson
twisted and winced, some lines were struck out, others were
amended, and a few added. On July 2, the Congress went
on record in favor of independence. On July 4, the final
draft of Jefferson’s paper was formally adopted, merely
confirming the fateful step already taken. Contrary to tra-
dition, no drama marked the roll call, no independence bell
rang out the news in joyous peals, no far-seeing prophet,
looking down the centuries, beheld countless generations
celebrating that event with solemn reverence—and _ fire-
crackers. Three or four days later the Declaration was
read in a public plaza, later known as Independence Square.
Copies were spread broadcast and published in city, town,
and village from New Hampshire to Georgia. In New
York the king’s statue was pulled down; in Rhode Island
it was provided that anyone guilty of praying for George
III, so respectfully addressed a few months before, should
be liable to a fine of a thousand pounds.

The Declaration of Independence itself falls into two
principal parts. The first, containing the moral ground
upon which the Revolutionists rested their cause, takes the
form of “self-evident truths”: all men are created equal
and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
the purpose of government is to make such rights secure;
for these reasons governments are instituted, deriving their
just power from the consent of the governed; whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these ends, the
people have a right to alter or abolish it and institute a

240 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

new government in a form most likely to effect their safety
and happiness.

These high doctrines, later called “glittering generali-
ties” by a critical orator, were not, as sometimes fancied,
French in their origin. As a matter of fact, they were
essentially English, being derived, as we have hinted, from
the writings of John Locke, the philosopher who supplied
the rhetorical defense mechanism for the Whig revolution
of 1688 which ended in the expulsion of James II. In
Locke’s hands the catechism of politics was short indeed:
the aim of government is to protect property and when any
government invades the privileges of property, the people
have a right to alter or abolish the government and estab-
lish a new one. The idea was almost a century old when
Jefferson artfully applied it in a modified form to the
exigencies of the American Revolution. Without effect did
the critics assail the creed as borrowed from England and
contrary to the facts of life. Jefferson easily countered by
saying that he claimed no originality for it. Neither was
he oblivious to the historical objections that could be urged
against it, but he was appealing to the verdict of the onrush-
ing future, not to the sanction of heavy custom.

The second part of the Declaration contained a summary
of colonial grievances launched at George III, making him
the scapegoat for the Parliament and ministry of Great
Britain. Ina long bill of particulars, the king was accused
of blocking laws passed by the local legislatures, imposing
on the colonies judges independent of their will, sending
upon them a swarm of royal officers to eat out their sub-
stance, quartering troops upon them, cutting off their com-
merce, laying taxes upon them without their consent, and
sending soldiers to harry their coasts, burn their towns, and
murder their people. Against these acts, petitions and
warnings had been vain and fruitless. Therefore, no course
was open to the colonies except to declare themselves free
and independent states and take their place among the
sovereign nations of the earth.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 241

§

If the lawyers in the Continental Congress had been as
adept in providing money, raising armies, collecting sup-
plies, and directing the course of the Revolution as in
drafting state papers, the War of Independence would
have been short. But in moving from the sphere of words
to the field of material goods and action, they met almost
insuperable obstacles. At the beginning they had no na-
tional treasury; there had never been such an institution on
the American continent. If there was no debt, there was
also no national credit. All financial resources had to be
raised from the void—and with great discretion.

Since one of the leading grievances against England had
been taxation, the Congress itself naturally had to be care-
ful about imposing burdens on the people. So it sought to
provide the sinews of war by resorting to paper money,
requisitions, and loans. Between 1775 and 1779, the Con-
gress issued about two hundred and forty million dollars
in bills to be redeemed by the states on a quota basis, a
huge total almost equaled by the emissions of the local
legislatures, making in the end over four hundred and fifty
millions in such notes. Its paper credits the Congress sup-
plemented by calls upon the states for financial aid, gaining
by the operation about fifty-five millions in inflated currency
and a small amount of specie.

The next resort was domestic and foreign loans. Cer-
tificates, similar to modern bonds, were sold in the home
market through loan offices set up in the states; in all, ap-
proximately sixty-seven millions in paper was brought into
the treasury by this process. To this unstable pyramid was
attached a mass of certificates issued by military officers
and by supply agents to pay for food, clothing, and other
goods impressed for the use of the army. After the con-
flict was advanced a little way help was obtained from
abroad. Small subsidies, in the form of gifts, were secured
from France and Spain. These were followed by regular

242 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

loans: France took more than three-fourths of the total
amount; Spain absorbed a portion; Holland risked the re-
mainder in 1782 after victory had been achieved in fact.

Though many attempts have been made to draw up a
balance sheet of revolutionary accounts, none is satisfac-
tory; the large variety of bills issued and the wide fluctua-
tions in the value of the money collected from the sale of
domestic bonds make all reckonings highly speculative.
According to the best estimates, the money obtained from
France was nearly equal to the specie value of the paper
received from the American purchasers of internal securi-
ties. It is dificult to believe that the Congress could have
staggered through the Revolution if it had not procured
such generous financial assistance from the government at
Paris.

The confusion that reigned in the operations of this
fiscal system defies description. As paper money was
poured out by the Congress it fell rapidly in value: in 1779
one paper dollar was worth only two or three cents in
specie. Attempts to stabilize it were futile; it slipped
almost steadily downward into the abyss, until at length
there was no term of contempt so expressive as ‘not worth
a continental.” The paper that flowed from the treasuries
of the states suffered a similar fate, sometimes even worse.
Virginia finally reached such a low estate that her notes
passed at the rate of a thousand to one, most of them
expiring in the hands of the holders. In vain did the Con-
gress and the states try to prevent depreciation and fix
prices; their most drastic measures produced meager re-
sults.

In the end the situation was simply ridiculous. ‘‘Bar-
ber shops were papered in jest with the bills, and sailors,
on returning from their cruises, being paid off in
bundles of this worthless paper money, had suits of clothes
made of it and with characteristic light-heartedness turned
their loss into frolic by parading through the streets in
decayed finery.’ The only people who came out of the

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 243

orgy with profit were the gamblers who speculated in the
currency as it fluctuated on its downward course with good
news from the battlefields and rumors of more specie from
France. Many doctors of finance, of course, proffered
advice but no way was found of overcoming the disease.

In the administration of its funds, the Congress was
hardly more successful. Owing to persistent jealousies it
refused for six years to erect an independent treasury in
charge of a competent executive. For a time it tried to
work through two treasurers, both appointed by majority
vote; then it created a financial committee of thirteen dele-
gates; in 1776 it appointed a treasury board of five mem-
bers. ‘Two years later it provided that three of the five
should be chosen outside congressional circles. Finally, in
desperation, at the opening of 1781, it abolished the board
and made Robert Morris, of Philadelphia, superintendent
of finance with large powers.

For three years Morris wrestled with the chaos before
him, trying to stabilize the currency, collect the arrears
from the states, and place the credit of the government on
a stable basis. Undoubtedly he achieved great results but
his operations involved him in scandals, some of the critics
going so far as to accuse him of keeping irregular accounts
and speculating in public funds. Indignantly Morris denied
these charges and answered each count with a bill of par-
ticulars. On weighing the evidence, his friends believed
that his vindication was complete and his family biographer
has sustained their verdict. However, another historian,
Davis R. Dewey, finding it difficult to discover just where
the financier’s private affairs ended and his public business
began, has raised a question as to how Morris was able
to escape using in one department the knowledge that he
had gained in the other.

To reduce a complicated story to a brief summary, the
patriots who controlled the state and continental machinery
of government either could not or would not tax their
property heavily enough to support the war. In extenua-

244 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tion they could argue that a large part of the movable
wealth was in the hands of the Tories who fled from the
land and that the farmers who made up the bulk of the
population had little money with which to pay taxes. Still
the facts stood. The major portion of the war charges,
leaving aside the aid rendered by Europe, was met in paper
notes, which were practically all repudiated, and by bonds,
which were later funded into a national debt sustained
chiefly by indirect taxes on consumers. In the process, the
heaviest losers were the soldiers who received, in return
for their sacrifices, reams of paper currency and paper
claims to lands in the wilderness of the West.

§

To win assistance in its tremendous enterprise, the Con-
gress naturally turned to foreign countries. Aware that the
colonists had for a long time carried on a lucrative trade
with Holland, France, and Spain, lawfully and unlawfully,
the Congress hoped to enlarge that business now that the
trammels of Great Britain were cast off. Its leading mem-
bers, men like Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson, were
also thoroughly familiar with the interests, prejudices, and
jealousies of Europe which might be bent to good account
for the revolutionary cause. Above all, they were ac-
quainted with the prolonged rivalry of the Continental
powers with Great Britain in the contest for world empire
and world commerce. No acute divination was required to
discern that the Congress could use these ancient grudges
to serve its pressing needs.

It was well known, for example, that French statesmen
were eager to see the colonial quarrel come to an issue of
arms. Since the loss of their prize possessions on the
American continent in the Seven Years’ War, they had
impatiently watched for a crisis that might offer an oppor-
tunity to repair the damage. When the excitement over
the Stamp Act was at its height, Louis XV dispatched

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 245

agents to America to observe the course of events, to report
on the prospects of revolution, and even to aid discreetly
the party of discontent. Ten years later, when Franklin
was about to leave the post of colonial agent in London, the
French ambassador to the British Court paid him
a visit and gave him a plain hint that America could count
on French assistance. Far-sighted Englishmen, like Chat-
ham, were at the very moment warning their countrymen
to take France into the reckoning in dealing with the colo-
nies and to expect her sword to fall into the scales if a
war occurred.

Knowing all these things and more, the Congress, soon
after it got under way in 1775, created a secret committee
to correspond with foreign powers and direct negotiations
with them. Early the next year, it sent Silas Deane of Con-
necticut, often styled the first American diplomat, to Paris
to sound the ground. A few months later, after independ-
ence had been declared, the Congress associated Franklin
and Arthur Lee with Deane as American representatives
at the French court. When the Revolution was well ad-
vanced John Jay was sent to Spain, John Adams to Hol-
land, and other agents to Vienna, Berlin, and St. Peters-
burg; but their labors brought scant results compared with
the aid won from France. Frederick the Great, King of
Prussia, though desirous of building up trade in the United
States, had no colonial ambitions and shrank from a col-
lision with the British sea power; so he cleverly declined
to give any direct assistance to the American cause. The
Empress of Russia, the great Catherine, less cordial,
simply ignored the American agent, permitting him to spend
his two years of service in humiliating obscurity at her
chilly capital. ‘The rivalry of Russia and England over
the Straits and India had not yet assumed large propor-
tions in the schemes of diplomats.

It was in Paris alone that the outlook was in any degree
favorable, and, of all the men in America available for
diplomacy, Franklin was best suited to manage the delicate

246 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

mission to that strategic city. His fame as a writer, a lover
of science, a free thinker, and a wit had preceded him.
His more serious works endeared him to the French phi-
losophers; when he and Voltaire kissed each other at the
Academy of Sciences, the crowd was in transports and the
cry rang through France: ‘How beautiful it was to see
Solon and Sophocles embrace!’’ Franklin’s experiments
with electricity were known to French scientists; indeed,
with their better equipment they were testing the theories
he had advanced. His homely aphorisms recorded in Poor
Richard touched the French bourgeois and the thrifty peas-
ant in a tender spot.

Moreover, France was at the moment under the spell
of Rousseau’s naturalism—a vigorous reaction from the
artificiality of court life—and the idea of a simple old man
dressed in a plain suit speaking for a republic of merchants
and farmers set the kingdom agog. Even the Queen,
Marie Antoinette, unwittingly played with fire by encour-
aging ‘‘our dear republican.” Though inclined to critical
judgments, John Adams, who later joined the American
embassy in France, had to admit that Franklin’s triumph
was complete: ‘His name was familiar to government and
people, to kings and courtiers, nobility, clergy, and phi-
losophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there
was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, a
coachman or a footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion
in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it and who did not
consider him as a friend to human kind.” There was a
ring of prophecy in Turgot’s motto for Franklin: “He
has torn the lightning from the sky; soon he will tear their
sceptres from the kings.” The French Revolution was but
a few years off.

Yet Franklin’s abilities, great as they were, would have
availed little with hard-headed French statesmen in com-
mand of royal coffers if the drift of circumstances had not
been in his favor—if some of them had not already been
convinced that an hour fraught with destiny was at hand.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 247

Indeed, before Deane arrived on the scene, Louis XVI’s
foreign minister, Count de Vergennes, had showed the King
how France could redress her grievances against Great
Britain and reduce the power of that haughty empire.

Early in the fray, a dashing Frenchman, Beaumarchais,
fired by restless love of adventure and interest in the Amer-
ican uprising, devoted talents and wealth in aiding the
revolutionists beyond the sea. In himself he was a host.
Author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of
Figaro, a courtier, musician, publisher, shipowner, manu-
facturer, and financier, he was widely known among the
people and had access to the seats of the mighty. His
lightest word in support of the American cause helped to
make enthusiasm for it in the streets, at the court, and
among business men. Obtaining with comparative ease
the sympathy of the French ministry, Beaumarchais or-
ganized, in June, 1776, a company under his own direction
and commenced at once to ship supplies to the struggling
rebels. Until the French government flung off secrecy and
made a formal alliance with the United States, he continued
to render this service—a service for which he was never
paid in full, contributing to history one of its mysteries:
‘‘Beaumarchais and the Lost Million.”

Though the French were covertly willing to risk money
in the American venture, they were very cautious about
anything beyond. For more than a year after Franklin’s
arrival at Paris in November, 1776, the royal government
would make him no promise of open assistance. The King
naturally did not take to the idea of fomenting revolu-
tions; his own finances were in disorder; and a war with
England was not to be entered into lightly. Moreover,
the progress of American arms did not give any indication
of a final triumph. After Washington had ousted the
British from Boston, the course of events on the whole had
run against him. He was badly defeated on Long Island
in the summer of that year, 1776, driven northward
through Harlem to White Plains, forced across the Hud-

248 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

son into New Jersey, and harried on down into Pennsyl-
vania. His brilliant exploit at Trenton on Christmas night
and his brush with Cornwallis at Princeton had been fol-
lowed by disaster at Brandywine, the loss of Philadelphia,
a reverse at Germantown, and retreat to Valley Forge.
Two strategic ports, New York and Philadelphia, were in
British hands; two great rivers, the Hudson and the Dela-
ware, were blocked; and a British general, Burgoyne, was
cutting his way into the heart of New York, thus insert-
ing a wedge between New England and the rest of the
states.

Every post brought sad news to Franklin but he retained
his courage. ‘Well, doctor,” said an Englishman to him
with a note of scorn, ‘Howe has taken Philadelphia.”
Stunned for a moment, the old wit found a reply: “I
beg your pardon, sir; Philadelphia has taken Howe.” Had
he realized it, the quip was more than wit. ‘The ease and
gay life of the city did indeed take possession of Howe
and eat into the fiber of his initiative, but the two diplo-
matic fencers in Paris could not have foreseen that. So, in
spite of all linguistic flourishes, the outlook was dark for
Franklin. Then suddenly the impossible happened: on Oc-
tober 16, 1777, General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga.
Early in December a special messenger from America
rushed into the courtyard of Franklin’s residence at Passy
with the news: ‘Burgoyne and his whole army are pris-
oners of war.”

Beaumarchais, who happened to be dining with Franklin
that very moment, grasping the full force of the report,
dashed off to Versailles in such haste that he upset his
coach and dislocated his arm. ‘The King, also deeply im-
pressed by the news, saw that the time had come to cast off
secrecy and join the Americans in their struggle against
Great Britain. ‘Treaties of commerce and alliance were
therefore framed and, after some haggling over terms, duly
signed on February 6, 1778. France recognized the inde-
pendence of the United States, a defensive alliance was

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIE CONFLICT 249

formed, plans for joint military action were drafted, and
Louis XVI then openly declared war on England.

In vain did Lord North try to break this union by offer-
ing generous terms to the Americans and by proposing
peace negotiations. It was then too late—impossible to
turn back the flood. Within a few more months races that
had fought each other two decades before in the wilderness
of Pennsylvania and on the Plains of Abraham were united
in battle array against the armies of King George. If
Franklin had failed as colonial agent in London, he had
been eminently successful at the French court.

Less fortunate, as we have said, were the American min-
isters in Spain and Holland. John Jay at the court of
Madrid, in spite of persistent efforts, was not able to
bring the Spanish king into an alliance with the United
States. That cautious monarch, besides shrinking from
the idea of a democracy on the eastern frontier of his
American dominion, was in no mood to open New Orleans
to the trade of the Ohio Valley.

Still, he remembered that Britain had destroyed Spain’s
sea power, had defied her colonial monopoly, and was domi-
nating the Mediterranean from the stronghold of Gib-
raltar. After much balancing of chances, he made a treaty
with France in 1779 which bound his country to enter the
war against England, but for the moment he refused to
recognize the independence of the United States or become
an ally of a revolutionary people. Republics were not to be
encouraged; ancient damages only were to be repaired.

Like the Spaniards, the Dutch were not on very good
terms with Great Britain. They too had memories of a
colonial empire wrecked by the might of England and they
also suffered from current irritations. At the opening of
the American Revolution, they had rushed to engage in a
profitable trade with the rebellious colonies, dispatching
cargo after cargo of munitions to their island of St. Eusta-
tius in the West Indies for transshipment to the United
States.

250 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Though strictly in accord with the canons of international
propriety, this operation was painful for Englishmen to
contemplate—old rivals coining money out of American
trafic, making powder and shells for Washington’s army,
and negotiating with the American minister at The Hague.
Finding that the business could not be stopped by processes
of search and seizure, the British declared war on The
Netherlands, seized the island of St. Eustatius, and con-
fiscated military property in a cavalier fashion. With
relative ease Adams now won from the Dutch a favorable
treaty and managed to induce Dutch bankers, gorged with
war profits, to make a loan to the struggling republic in
spite of its low standing in the markets of Europe.

§

In military as well as financial and diplomatic affairs the
Continental Congress was driven from pillar to post,
plagued by its own ineptitude, and lashed by necessity.
Hurried by radical pressure into a war for which no real
preparation had been made, it was compelled to improvise
as it went along. It was well aware that the result de-
pended in final analysis upon the fighting men, but it shrank
from the hard test of fact. Its members had read history;
they knew how in other times and places armies had domi-
nated civilians, pulled down legislatures, and set up dic-
tators; they recalled the lessons taught by Cesar and
Cromwell; they hoped against hope that the war could be
won by militiamen commanded by elected officers and sus-
tained by faith rather than by wages and pensions.

At the outset the congressional statesmen found them-
selves by chance in control of the raw troops that had
rushed to besiege the British in Boston. Under the stress
of the hour they transformed that motley array into the
Continental Army, supplementing this action later by ad-
vising the states to enroll in the militia all able-bodied men
between sixteen and fifty. But the Congress was not long

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 251

in discovering that such an ‘“‘army’’ could not be relied
upon for severe and protracted campaigns. The men were
enlisted for short terms; they lacked discipline; they left
in shoals at times when their services were most needed.

Before the war was six months old it was made plain that
the volunteer militia system had failed. Washington knew
from the beginning that it was bound to fail. ‘To place
any dependence upon militia,” he said, “is assuredly resting
upon a broken staff.” Early in February, 1776, he urged
the Congress to take steps toward the creation of a regular
army. ‘Io bring men to be well acquainted with the duties
of a soldier requires time,’’ he told the august legislature
of merchants, doctors, and lawyers. ‘Three things prompt
men to regular discharge of their duty in time of action:
natural bravery, hope of reward, and fear of punishment.”’
Accordingly he urged the formation of a national army com-
posed of men enlisted for the war, directed by officers ap-
pointed with reference to merits rather than _ political
geography, and guaranteed compensation worthy of the
cause.

Only in a hesitant and half-hearted manner did the Con-
gress respond to Washington’s demand. In September,
1776, eight months after his emphatic call for help, it or-
dered the enrollment of eighty-eight battalions enlisted for
the duration of the war—a term later changed to three
years—and promised, in addition to a small cash bounty,
a grant of land at the close of the contest. In December,
in an awful fright, the Congress made Washington dictator-
general for six months with full power to raise troops, col-
lect supplies, and punish disaffected persons; and a short
time after the expiration of this period it renewed the high
authority, under closer limitations. Disappointed in these
efforts to create an army, the Congress finally ‘‘advised”
the states to fill their quotas by drafting men for a nine
months period. At no time, however, did the central gov-
ernment, such as it was, escape from abject dependence
upon the states. Whenever it decreed a new levy, it relied

252 THE.RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

from choice or necessity upon the states to raise the quotas
assigned to them. Never, at any time, did it have ready and
disciplined for battle more than a fragment of its paper
enrollment.

Bitter fruits of this ineptitude were gathered in the
bloodshed, agony, and cost of a prolonged war. When
the struggle opened, there were approximately ninety thou-
sand American soldiers under arms, against twenty thou-
sand British. At the close the American forces had dwin-
dled to less than one-third the original number and the
British had doubled their strength. If the Congress had
given Washington a permanent army when he called for it
in February, 1776, he might have ended the war in six
months. But it could not, or at all events did not, meet
his urgent appeal and the conflict dragged on for seven
weary years.

In the course of it nearly four hundred thousand Amer-
icans were enlisted for some kind of service without ever
providing an invincible battle array. Moreover, while the
Congress, from the beginning to the end of the contest,
complained bitterly about the expenses, the country even-
tually had to pay heavily for its parsimony. A hundred
years after the Declaration of Independence, the Federal
Government had disbursed eighty million dollars in pensions
to soldiers of the Revolution, and was still remunerating
‘war widows.”

The civilian fear of the army which inspired the military
policy of the Congress was even extended to the Com-
mander-in-chief, stimulated by officers who were jealous
of Washington or who honestly believed that he was lack-
ing in decision and energy. Some of the critics—men of
consequence, such, for instance, as Horatio Gates, Thomas
Mifflin, Thomas Conway, and Charles Lee—using their
great influence to the limit, worked up in the Congress and
in the army a dangerous opposition known as the “Conway
Cabal.”

Obscurity hung over the early stages of this proceeding

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 253

but near the end of 1777 it became evident that there was
a strong movement on foot to curtail the General’s power
and perhaps force him out of the field. Signs of this enter-
prise were unmistakable. The Congress promoted Conway
in spite of Washington’s objections, appointed him to the
post of inspector-general of the army, created independent
commands, and established the worst of all military insti-
tutions, a board of control.

Stung by criticism, Washington assured the Congress,
with broad irony, that it was ‘“‘a much easier and less
distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable
room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold, bleak hill
and sleep under frost and snow, without clothes or
blankets.’’ His firmness and good sense rallied his friends
and in time he had the pleasure of seeing the cabal fail;
but until the victory at Yorktown, his movements were han-
dicapped by detractors in the Congress and his plans were
more than once defeated by the failure of that body to
furnish the men and supplies necessary for aggressive
campaigns.

§

It is hypercritical, perhaps, to magnify the shortcomings
of the Continental Congress in fiscal, diplomatic, and mili-
tary affairs. Certainly a balanced judgment takes into ac-
count the fact that it was little more than a glorified debat-
ing society speaking for thirteen independent states, each
of which claimed to be sovereign and was deeply occupied
with its own problems, civil and military. After all, the
Congress was only a remote organ of a revolutionary mass
movement—an instrument created by the agencies of re-
bellion in the states. The latter were in reality the prime
factors in driving on the conflict with Great Britain. The
initiative for independence, as we have seen, came from the
advanced colonial assemblies rather than from the delegates
at Philadelphia and the support of the war fell mainly on
them. State governors, like Trumbull of Connecticut, Clin-

254 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ton of New York, and Rutledge of South Carolina, carried
heavier burdens than the president of the Continental
Congress.

Among the great engines employed by the Revolutionists
in overturning the government of George III were local
committees of correspondence and state conventions, irregu-
lar in composition and despotic in powers. In the initial
stages of the agitation the discontented colonists operated
through regular agencies, the town assemblies and local
legislatures; but as the contest became more heated the
revolutionary leaders began to form independent bodies
which finally became the germs of new American govern-
ments. Early in November, 1772, there was organized in
Boston under the direction of Samuel Adams a committee
of correspondence charged with the duty of holding meet-
ings, sending emissaries into other towns, and conducting
a campaign of popular education against British policy.
Almost in a flash the colonies were covered with a network
of local associations of this character.

To and fro among them flew the shuttle of communica-
tion, the tireless labors of Adams keeping New England
alert and stirring sluggards at the ends of the country.
With his trembling hand, he wrote sheaves of letters to
the leaders of committees in various towns, encouraging
them to stand fast in their resistance to the British Crown.
In reply he received reports on the course of public opinion.
From the rough scrawl of a fisherman who knew the ocean’s
rage, he learned about the temperature of local liberties;
from a blacksmith who turned from the flaming forge to
answer an inquiry, he heard that the popular cause was
flourishing.

Upon town and county structures were built the higher
agencies of the province. Taking the lead in this operation,
the Virginia House of Burgesses, in 1773, or rather its
rebellious members, appointed a special committee to enter
into communication with the sister colonies and within
twelve months all except one had such an extra-legal organ

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 255

of opinion and power. As the struggle advanced apace,
colonial assemblies were purged of the loyalists or conven-
tions were organized to take their place, thus providing
from the community to the state capital a chain of revolu-
tionary engines. Inspired by a sense of solidarity, informed
by a constant exchange of news, the active radicals directed
agitation, called periodical conferences of the faithful,
seized the reins of government as they fell from the hands
of royal officers, laid hold of local treasuries, waged war,
and sustained the American cause.

At first the king’s officers looked on the petty committee
of correspondence as an absurd instrument of factional
strife but they soon discovered in it the menacing force of
a new state. One high Tory, Daniel Leonard, called it
“the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent that ever
issued from the egg of sedition.’”’ Changing the figure, he
continued: “I saw the small seed when it was implanted;
it was a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant until
it has become a great tree.” By this time local committees
and conventions had been crowned by state committees and
conventions and the entire substructure finished off by the
grand convention, the Continental Congress, with its numer-
ous organs for action, functioning in every sphere of sov-
ereignty—legislation, finance, war, and diplomacy. A new
political organism had been called into being, feeble at first,
but destined to rule a continent and islands in distant seas.

§

In ousting British authorities and their sympathizers
from power, the directors of these committees and conven-
tions received only a partial support from the populace.
Just what proportion of the people actually favored the
Revolution was never ascertained by a referendum and no
accurate report on the strength of the patriot party was
ever compiled by any official agency. From the frag
mentary figures of early elections that have been preserved,

256 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

however, it seems that a very small per cent of the colonists
were politically active in spite of the excitement that often
characterized partisan contests.

Consider, for example, the experience of Boston. On the
eve of the Revolution, that city had approximately 20,000
inhabitants, of whom about 4,000 were adult males.
Roughly speaking, 1,000 of the latter were disfranchised
by the existing property qualifications, leaving 3,000 po-
tential voters. From the records of the tempestuous decade
between 1765 and 1775 it has been estimated that the
highest vote cast in the town during the period was 1,089,
while the average vote was only 555, or about one in six
of the qualified electors. In the stormy year of 1765 when
Boston was shaken from center to circumference over the
Stamp Act, an election was held for the colonial assembly,
with Sam Adams stirring up furor as a candidate; four
hundred and forty-eight votes were cast—two hundred and
sixty-five for Adams, awarding victory to him. In other
words, the firebrand of revolution elected on that occasion
spoke for less than 10 per cent of the eligible voters of
Boston. At a Connecticut general election in 1775 when
the fray was growing hot, there appeared at the polls 3,477
voters out of a population of nearly 200,000, of whom
40,797 were males over twenty years of age. In the other
colonies, the same apathy seems to have prevailed; nothing
but an extraordinary contest drew to the polls one-third of
the voters.

No doubt there were many voteless mechanics who gave
their support to the revolutionary cause. They agitated,
rioted, and fought in the army but they were relatively few
innumber. Moreover, their support was none too welcome;
indeed, their demand for the right to take part in the elec-
tion of committees and conventions was coldly repulsed at
first by the enfranchised patriots. Even the choice of local
agents to enforce the boycott against British goods, pro-
claimed by the Continental Congress in 1774, was entrusted
only to men who possessed appropriate property or tax-

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 257

paying qualifications under colonial laws. As a matter of
fact, the directors who engineered the Revolution at the
top contemplated no drastic alteration in arrangements at
the bottom. Taking all these things into account, there-
fore, it would be conservative to say that, as far as ballot-
ing was a measure of popular support, not more than one-
third of the adult white males in America ever set the seal
of their approval on the Revolution by voting for its com-
mitteemen and delegates.

At best the sentiment behind independence was a matter
of gradual growth. After the war had been going for a
year, an advocate of independence was regarded as a dan-
gerous person, and was likely to be greeted with angry
glances in the streets of Philadelphia. As late as that the
Continental Congress, though composed of delegates openly
opposed to British policy and chosen by groups from which
all avowed Tories were excluded, was so divided in opinion
that ‘every important step was opposed and carried by
bare majorities.’ Such at least is the testimony of John
Adams. Four months before independence was finally de-
clared there was still in the Congress a powerful group
hostile to revolution in any form—a group made up prin-
cipally of delegates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Mary-
land, Delaware, New York, and South Carolina. Only by
the most adroit negotiation were the advocates of inde-
pendence able to carry the day, and at the bitter end New
York abstained from the vote.

In a final reckoning, John Adams decided that two-
thirds of the people were at last committed to the Revo-
lution and that not more than one-third opposed it at all
stages. On the Tory side, however, this estimate was not
accepted. Joseph Galloway, who left official service in
Pennsylvania and fled to England when he saw the storm
breaking, declared in 1779 before a committee of Parlia-
ment that, at the beginning of the conflict, not one-fifth of
the people had independence in view and he added that at
the moment “many more than four-fifths of the people

258 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

would prefer a union with Great Britain upon constitutional
principles to that of independence.”

Obviously both Adams and Galloway were guessing.
Doubtless opinion fluctuated with the course of the strug-
gle that raged now in one section, now in another, now
accompanied by success, now by failure and discouragement.
On the whole, the English historian, Lecky, had some basis
for saying that ‘the American Revolution, like most
others, was the work of an energetic minority who suc-
ceeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority
to courses for which they had little love and leading them
step by step to a position from which it was impossible to
recede.’ Perhaps after all a nice discussion of the question
is only pertinent in an age that lays stress upon mathe-
matical politics.

Whether they formed a majority of the populace or not
the revolutionary masses assumed obligations and engi-
neered activities of the first magnitude. Far and wide,
through many agencies, they prosecuted with unremitting
fervor an agitation in favor of the patriot cause. Inde-
pendent state constitutions were established. The Tory
opposition was suppressed or kept under strict surveillance.
All the ordinary functions of government were discharged,
at least in a fashion—the administration of justice, the levy
of taxes, the maintenance of order, and the enactment of
enlightened and humane legislation. To these obligations
were joined stern duties connected with the war: raising
quotas of men and money, collecting and forwarding sup-
plies, promoting the sale of Continental bonds, and co-
operating with the Congress in the restraint of speculators
and profiteers. Furthermore, since the fighting spread up
and down the coast, most of the states were called upon
at one time or another to raise local forces and meet the
enemy on their own soil.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 259

Intense and wide must have been the agitation carried
on by the patriots. Hundreds of pamphlets, bundles of
faded letters, files of newspapers, and collections of car-
toons, broadsides, and lampoons reveal an intellectual fer-
ment comparable to that which marked the course of the
Puritan revolution in England more than a hundred years
before. Notices of public meetings held to cheer the leaders
in the forum and the armies in the field bear witness to the
tumult of opinion that marked the progress of the American
cause. Entries in diaries tell of heated debates in taverns
where ‘John Presbyter, Will Democrack, and Nathan
Smuggle,” to use the Tory gibe, roundly damned the king
and his ‘‘minions’”’ and put the fear of battle and sudden
death into the hearts of royalists and lukewarm subjects.
Letters open the doors of private houses, disclosing families
and their friends at dinner or seated by fireplaces in lively
debate on the fortunes of the day and the tasks ahead. In
the familiar correspondence of husbands and wives, such
as the letters of John and Abigail Adams or of James and
Mercy Warren, are revealed the springs of faith and affec-
tion that fed the currents of action.

Ministers of religion in large numbers, especially the
dissenters, seem to have turned from the gospel to revolu-
tion. Such is the testimony of friend and foe. ‘Does
Mr. Wiberd preach against oppression ?”’ anxiously inquired
John Adams of his wife. ‘The clergy of every denomina-
tion, not excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten
every Sabbath,” replied Abigail. ‘‘The few that pretend
to preach,” snorted the Tory Cresswell, ‘‘are mere retailers
of politics, sowers of sedition and rebellion, serve to blow
the cole of discord and excite the people to arms. ‘The
Presbyterian clergy are particularly active in supporting
the measures of Congress from the rostrum, gaining prose-
lytes, persecuting the unbelievers, preaching up the right-
eousness of their cause, and persuading the unthinking
populace of the infallibility of success!”

In the sermons that the printing press has preserved, the

260 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

philosophy of John Locke is curiously blended with illus-
trations from the Old Testament. While the right of the
people to abolish and institute governments is proclaimed,
George III is reminded of the fate of Rehoboam; and states
that do not furnish their quotas of men and money to the
American cause are told that the people of Meroz were
cursed for similar faults. Even the Reverend Oliver Hart,
of Charleston, who found time in the very midst of the
Revolution to preach a strong sermon on ‘Dancing Ex-
ploded,” was so energetic in his support of independence
that he did not dare to remain in the city after it was cap-
tured by the British.

Among the secular writers, Tom Paine was the most
trenchant and influential. His ringing appeal for independ-
ence made in Common Sense, printed early in 1776, was
followed in December by another shrill cry to the people,
rallying them to the patriot side. He had been with Wash-
ington’s disheartened forces as they retreated from Fort
Lee down through New Jersey; he had suffered with them
and knew by what frail reeds the Revolution was now
supported. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,”
he opened in a resounding sentence calculated to muster the
wavering. ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot
will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but
he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men
and women.”’

In pelting periods, Paine lashed the Tories, accusing
them of self-interest, servility, and fear. In shrewd lines
of encouragement he made light of the recent reverses
strung all the way from Harlem to White Plains, across
the Hudson and down into Pennsylvania, assuring the public
that this strategic retreat was the promise of victory, not
disaster. Coming to the burden of his argument, he warned
the patriots that more heroic efforts were needed to save
the day, that the militia was unequal to its task, a regular
army must be raised, and greater perseverance shown.
Drawing in conclusion pictures of victory won by fortitude

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 261

and of defeat suffered by cowardice, he called upon Ameri-
cans to choose their fate.

This pamphlet Paine followed by others equally vivid
until the goal was at last in sight. Whatever may be said
of his shortcomings and his wayward spirit—Theodore
Roosevelt, with characteristic impatience and a woeful dis-
regard for exactness, called him ‘‘a dirty little atheist”—
Paine’s services to the Revolution were beyond calculation.
For this we have the evidence of men as far apart in their
general views as Washington and Jefferson.

§

While one type of patriot was engaged in stirring up
revolutionary ardor, in dissolving the intellectual and moral
bonds of the old order, and in constructing the ethics of the
new day, another was devoted to political action. The rise
of revolutionary committees and conventions within the
colonial society soon led to the breakdown of the established
governments. From royal and proprietary colonies alike,
governors, judges, and other high officers usually scurried in
haste. Wentworth fled from New Hampshire in the sum-
mer of 1775; Martin of North Carolina slipped away from
Wilmington to Cape Fear on a dark night in April; Tryon
of New York sought safety in July on board a man-of-war
in the harbor, laconically announcing: “A committee has
assumed the whole powers of government.”’

Since royal institutions were crumbling, suggestions for
new political plans were in order. Anticipating the transi-
tion from colony to state, Paine sketched a project in his
pamphlet on Commonsense, A short time afterward John
Adams brought out Thoughts on Government, in which,
with his usual gravity, he argued for a conservative order
of things. Meanwhile local assemblies were at work. In
January, 1776, New Hampshire drafted an emergency plan
of administration, pending reconciliation with England, and
in March South Carolina followed her example. This was

262 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a gesture toward independence and was so viewed by the
critics.

Seeing the drift of events, the Congress, in May, sent
out a resolution advising the people of all the colonies to
adopt new governments appropriate to their needs. Before
the year was over, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, and New York had framed
constitutions and embarked on careers of self-determina-
tion. Connecticut and Rhode Island, already accustomed
to electing their own executives and legislatures, replied
that in the main their old charters would meet their needs,
reference to the king having been deleted. South Carolina
in 1778 revised the instrument adopted before independence
and two years later Massachusetts, after a heated wrangle,
put into effect a constitution that was destined to endure
in its broad outlines for more than a century.

Under these new plans, state governments took the place
of the revolutionary assemblies that had hitherto directed
the fortunes of the thirteen colonies, assuming, with a cer-
tain formality, the responsibilities of power. First among
their duties, of course, was to aid the Congress in suppress-
ing the opposition and in prosecuting the war. A clear
test of allegiance having now been provided, the people of
each state were called upon to declare their devotion to the
new institutions, while the pressure brought to bear on
loyalists by provincial assemblies and irregular combina-
tions of patriots was redoubled. Mobs had tarred and
feathered Tories, otherwise cruelly treated them, and
wrecked their homes; henceforth the management of dis-
senters was to proceed more systematically. The most
ardent of the known and active opponents of the Revolution
were shut up in jail; the prison camp in Connecticut at one
time held the former governor of New Jersey and the
mayor of New York.

Others less belligerent, after being duly warned, were
placed under surveillance. The more timid and skittish,
as John Adams characterized the milder Tories, escaped

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 263

the toils of the law by refraining from irritating conduct.
“T might as well be in the infernal regions,” groaned Cress-
well, ‘“‘as in this country where my sentiments are known.
Every rascal looks on me as an enemy to him and except
I could tacitly submit to every insult or divest myself of
the faculties of sight, speech and hearing, must be miser-
able.” Thousands who could not endure the new order
or feared harsh treatment fled to Canada, England, or
some other part of the British Empire.

The property of the Tories, as well as their persons, was
now subjected to official control. Early in the course of
the Revolution several of the states began to confiscate the
goods of the loyalists. Taking the cue from these radical
commonwealths, the Congress in November, 1777, advised
them all to seize the property of the men who were not
entitled to ‘“‘protection” and apply the proceeds to the pur-
chase of Continental certificates. By the time the armed
conflict was over, statutes of condemnation and forfeiture
had been enacted everywhere.

This was, of course, delicate business. It was difficult
to discover by jury trial or judicial inquiry just what degree
of taint warranted the appropriation of property. More-
over, the sale of estates and the administration of funds
called for probity of the loftiest order—a kind of Spartan
honesty which was not always found in the turmoil of the
Revolution. In fact the sequestration of estates was marked
by corruption and scandals that shocked all sensitive per-
sons. To the loyalists the revolutionary commissioners
were bands of bloodthirsty robbers; to the patriots fighting
desperately for independence any moderate treatment of
domestic foes seemed to fall short of poetic justice.

In addition to their local labors of administration and
patriotism, the state governments furnished most of the
men and supplies for the war. Having no direct taxing
power, the Congress relied upon them to support its credit.
Though its hopes and demands were constantly defeated
by weak and negligent legislatures, it managed to wring

264 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

from their treasuries nearly six million dollars, specie value
—an amount almost equal to the sum obtained by Conti-
nental bond-sales through the loan offices. It also made
requisitions upon them for supplies, corn, pork, beef, rum,
and other goods, and all in all it succeeded in securing
large quantities by that means.

When Washington’s men were freezing and starving at
Valley Forge and Pennsylvania farmers were selling
their produce to the British in Philadelphia at good prices,
Governor Henry of Virginia helped to redress the balance
by sending up to the soldiers great loads of food and
clothing. It was upon the states also that the Congress
had to depend for men to fill the army and, if their short-
comings were conspicuous, still it could be said that heroic
efforts were often made to comply with the demands.
Moreover, some of the state governors were military men
and took the field in person against the enemy; and in many
theaters local militiamen fought side by side with troops
from the Continental Army. If critics deplored their weak-
ness, apologists could make a show of defense by reference
to obvious facts.

§

In this mass movement in which preachers, pamphleteers,
committees, lawyers, and state governments advanced the
revolutionary cause, women in every section played their
customary role of backing up their fighting men with all
the intensity of emotion and loyalty to their kind that war
had always inspired in the “gentle” sex, except among a
few pacific Quakers. Lysistrata, summoning her sisters
to strike against the arbitrament of arms, was a character
in fiction created by the mind of man. The revolutionary
records seem to indicate patriot valor on the part of women
commensurate in fervor with that of men.

Nearly every male leader of the rebellion had a wife,
sister, or daughter actively at work in the second line of
defense. Propaganda of the pen was waged by Mercy

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 265

Warren, sister of James Otis and wife of James Warren,
who wrote satires and farces in the elaborate style of the
day, scoring loyalists and praising liberty—offering these as
replies to the British playwrights and the actors who were
delighting New York crowds with their caricatures of the
patriots. Women were also to be found among the pub-
lishers and editors of newspapers, encouraging the writers
of stirring pleas for independence, trying to make the pen
as mighty as the sword.

In every branch of economy that kept the social order
intact and the army supplied, to the degree that it was,
women were industrious laborers and energetic promoters.
They had long formed the majority of the workers in the
textile industry and throughout the war the whirr of their
wheels and the clank of their looms were heard in the land
as they spun and wove for soldiers and civilians alike.
Letters of the time reveal them sowing, reaping, and man-
aging the affairs of farm as well as kitchen. They gave
lead from their windows and pewter from their shelves
to be melted into bullets, united in a boycott of English
luxuries, combined to extend the use of domestic manufac-
tures, canvassed from door to door when money and pro-
visions for the army were most needed.

As non-combatants it was often women’s obligation to
face marauding soldiers; Catherine Schuyler, setting the
torch to her own crops in her fields near Saratoga before
the advancing British troops and watching with composure
the roaring flames that devoured her food with theirs,
proved how courageously women could fight in their way.
In the wake of the British armies, South and North, they
labored to restore their ruined homes and hold together
the fragments of their family property for the veterans
when they should return.

Stern disciplinarians they were too, in their steadfastness
to the faith. They formed committees to visit profiteers
and warn them against extortion. In one instance they
seized a supply of tea in the hands of a stubborn merchant

266 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and sold it over the counter at a price fixed by themselves.
“Madam,” said John Adams to Mrs. Huston at Falmouth,
‘Gs it lawful for a weary traveler to refresh himself with
a dish of tea, provided it has been honestly smuggled or
paid no duties?’ ‘The answer was decisive. ‘‘No, sir, we
have renounced all tea in this place, but I'll make you
coffee.” There was no redress. ‘‘I must be weaned,”
lamented the wayfarer, ‘‘and the sooner the better.”’ The
young ladies of Amelia County, Virginia, were reported to
have formed an agreement ‘‘not to permit the addresses
of any person, be his circumstances or situation in life what
they will, unless he has served in the American armies long
enough to prove by his valor that he is deserving of their
love.”’
§

It would be a mistake, however, in portraying this wide-
spread movement of the people, to represent the patriot
masses facing the enemy in solid array. ‘The contrary is
the truth. Everywhere the supporters of the Revolution
were divided into conservative and radical wings, the
former composed mainly of merchants and men of sub-
stance and the latter of mechanics and yeomen-farmers,
sometimes led by men of the other group. In Massachusetts
an insurgent left wing drew up a state constitution pleasing
to the politicians but was not strong enough to force
its adoption. By a skillful combination, the aristocracy of
“wealth and talents’ defeated the plan and substituted a
system which safeguarded the rights and privileges of prop-
erty at every bastion. Morison describes the instrument
briefly: ‘The Constitution of 1780 was a lawyers’ and
merchants’ constitution, directed toward something like
quarterdeck efficiency in government and the protection of
property ‘against democratic pirates.”

Pennsylvania was harassed by similar factions—sharply
marked in their divisions and violent in their relations—
which engaged in long and unseemly wrangles on every issue

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 267

of the hour. At one time the revolutionary government
itself was assailed by a still more revolutionary group and
blood was shed. Even after astute management had re-
stored calm among the patriots, local conflicts continued to
consume the energies of their leaders until independence
was finally won. For this reason, among others, Pennsy]-
vania, though ranking among the largest and richest states,
was constantly hampered in complying with the requests of
the Continental Congress.

Nor were the Southern states any more fortunate.
Throughout the war a desperate struggle was waged in
Virginia between planters on the seaboard and small farm-
ers of the interior—‘‘a struggle which involved nothing less
than a revolution in the social order of the Old Dominion
with its Established Church and its landed aristocracy.”
As a result many historic families on the coastal plain hated
Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry far more than they
did the Englishmen who served as the king’s officers.

A kindred spirit flamed out in South Carolina, where
slave-owners of the lowlands and merchants of the towns
engaged in almost daily contests with mechanics from the
shops and farmers from the back country. On one occasion,
the heat of the dispute moved even Gadsden, a leader of
the radicals, to inquire ‘“‘whether there is not a danger
amongst us far more dangerous than anything that can arise
from the whole herd of Contemptible, exportable Tories.”
So threatening in fact was the menace—a group of “‘level-
ers’’ bent on overthrowing the aristocracy of ‘‘wealth and
talents’’—that the notables of the state had to exercise
considerable skill in saving their privileges and prestige.

Across the border in Georgia the social battle between
conservatives and radicals was carried to such a pitch that
in a moment of bitter rivalry the patriot party could boast
of two legislatures and two executives. While the British
were laying waste their state, these factions dissipated their
strength in fruitless bickering; on both sides, according to
Allan Nevins, historian of the crisis, were many men who

268 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

preferred defeat at the hands of their common foe to the
triumph of their American rivals.

§

These divisions among the patriots were embittered by
continuous, vitriolic assaults from the loyalists who stuck
by their guns. Before the Revolution had advanced far,
Tory partisans—editors, poets, and pamphleteers—had
devised a complete scheme of rhetorical offense. Moderates
among them admitted that there had been evils in the
policies and measures of Great Britain but insisted that, by
the process of petition and argument, every wrong could
be righted. They all appealed to the verdict of history:
the Revolution violated the traditions, the ancient ties, and
the ceremonials inherited from a distant past; it was con-
trary to the divine order expressed in the English régime;
the doctrine of equality to which it appealed was “‘ill-
founded and false, both in its premises and conclusions” ;
the leveling movement fostered by it threatened the world
with ‘‘a low opinion of government”’ by treating the state
as ‘‘a mere human ordinance,” and rulers as ‘“‘mere servants
of the public.”

The whole revolutionary program, according to this
school, was indefensible in the light either of history or
reason. “Of all the theories respecting the origin of
government,” wrote the eloquent Tory divine, Jonathan
Boucher, “with which the world has been either puzzled,
amused or instructed, that of the Scriptures alone is accom-
panied by no insuperable difficulties. It was not to be
expected from an all-wise and all-merciful Creator, that,
having formed creatures capable of order and rule, he
should turn them loose into the world under the guidance
only of their own unruly wills.” No, ran the argument,
God had put kings and superior persons in the world to
govern it. In short, the Revolution, as the Tories saw it,
flew in the face of experience, history, and divine sanction;

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 269

hoary and crusted reputability was all on the side of the
provincial status.

From this theorem, Tory propagandists proceeded to the
next. The Revolution had been stirred up by a few crafty
men who had played upon the ignorance and passions of
the mob; by a handful of conspirators was the “draught
designed to cheat the crowd and fascinate mankind.” And
these conspirators were ‘‘an infernal, dark-designing group
of men... obscure, pettifogging attorneys, bankrupt
shopkeepers, outlawed smugglers . . . wretched banditti

. the refuse and dregs of mankind.” At least in this
guise they appeared to the editor of the New York Gazette
on May 23, 1778.

Old Catiline, and Cromwell too,
Jack Cade and his seditious crew,

Hail brother-rebel at first view,
And hope to meet the Congress,

ran a Tory ballad on the patriots who framed and adopted
the Declaration of Independence. Individuals partook of
the nature of the whole band, General John Sullivan being
presented by a poet as a fair type:

Amidst ten thousand eminently base,

Thou, Sullivan, assume the highest place!
Sailor, and farmer, barrister of vogue,

Each state was thine, and thou in each a rogue.

Nor did the Tory scribes spare the great Washington: at.
the unconquerable soul of the Revolution Jonathan Odell
flung these lines and more:

Thou hast supported an atrocious cause

Against thy king, thy country, and the laws;
Committed perjury, encouraged lies,

Forced conscience, broken the most sacred ties;
Myriads of wives and fathers at thy hand

Their slaughtered husbands, slaughtered sons, demand;
That pastures hear no more the lowing kine,

That towns are desolate, all—all is thine.

270 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

While such was the Tory view of the revolutionary lead-
ers, outstanding figures in the American cause, the loyalist
opinion of the rank and file was even less favorable.
Thomas Paine was called ‘our hireling author .. . true
son of Grub Street.’’ ‘The ‘‘commissioners of loans, and
boards of war, marine committees, commissaries, scribes,
assemblies, councils, senatorial tribes’? were ‘‘wretches
whose very acts the French abhor.” Washington was “at
the head of ragged ranks. Hunger and itch are with him

. and all the lice of Egypt in his train. . . . Great cap-
tain of the western Goths and Huns.” The soldiers were
“half savages,’ from ‘‘the backwoods.” ‘The patriot camp
was filled with “priests, tailors, and cobblers, . . . and
sailors, insects vile. that’ emerge to light, |. rats who
nestle in the lion’s den.” ‘Their inspiration was “treason

- ambition '.(. s.hypoenisyidesiieienaud ys) bundles*or

lies...) Calumnpatinens eal ot brotmien. SCrucityme
cunning‘) .").malice ..).” persecution’. and supersce
tion.”

Here anarchy before the gaping crowd
Proclaims the people’s majesty aloud... .

The blust’rer, the poltroon, the vile, the weak,
Who fight for Congress, or in Congress speak.

Having poured the vials of their wrath upon the heads
of the revolutionary party, Tory pamphleteers accused the
patriots of proclaiming liberty as their goal and then wad-
ing through tar and blood and tyranny to attain it.

For one lawful ruler, many tyrants we’ve got,
Who force young and old to their wars, to be shot,

exclaimed one Tory poet.

Tarr’d, feather’d, and carted for drinking Bohea?—
And by force and oppression, compell’d to be free?—
The same men maintaining that all human kind

Are, have been, and shall be, as free as the wind,
Yet impaling and burning their slaves for believing
The truth of the lessons they’re constantly giving?

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 271

queried another. ‘You find these pretended enemies of op-
pression the most unrelenting oppressors,’ lamented the
rector of Trinity Church in New York, ‘‘and their little
finger heavier than the king’s loins. . . . There is more lib-
erty in Turkey than in the dominions of the Congress.”
And all this had been done, ran the refrain, by self-consti-
tuted committees, conventions, and assemblies that had
usurped authority and set themselves up as legislators and
governors.
§

The weakness of the revolutionary movement, as re-
vealed in controversy, politics, government, and adminis-
tration, was of course reflected in all phases of the military
operations. Improvisation and guesswork marked every
stage. When the Revolution assumed the aspect of an
organized conflict, there was not available a single army
officer experienced in the stratagems of combat on a large
scale, as distinguished from local fighting. Washington
had been under fire in the French and Indian conflict, show-
ing courage and resourcefulness in the presence of danger
and death; but when he took command of the forces at
Cambridge in 1775, no one knew the measure of his
greatness.

A few of his officers had heard the whistle of bullets:
Horatio Gates, Daniel Morgan, and Philip Schuyler had
taken some part in the French War, but their knowledge
of military science was limited. Most of his immediate
subordinates came straight from civilian life. Benedict
Arnold, who finally betrayed his countrymen, was a mer-
chant at New Haven when the news of Lexington sum-
moned him to arms; Nathanael Greene, a farmer and black-
smith in Rhode Island; Anthony Wayne, a farmer and sur-
veyor in Pennsylvania; Francis Marion, a South Carolina
planter whose military experience was limited to a brush
with the Indians; while John Sullivan of New Hampshire
was a lawyer more familiar with legal briefs than with the

272 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

sword. Israel Putnam, a farmer from Connecticut, insisted
on riding at the head of his men at Boston in his shirt
sleeves with an old hat on his head as if he were still in the
cornfield—much to the anguish of spruce young officers
from the Middle and Southern states. Though all these
men had natural ability and undoubted courage, their genius
had not been tried in long campaigns.

Less experienced than their officers were the armed forces
usually commanded by untutored captains. The regulars
in the Continental line were never very numerous; those
who survived the fortunes of the early battles and endured
the severity of discipline, flogging and torture, were in
the course of time developed into first-rate soldiers able to
give a good account of themselves with rifle and bayonet.
But even that branch of the army was in constant peril of
demoralization. The pay of the men was nearly always
sadly in arrears and, when it came, usually in the form of
depreciated paper. Their support in materials was de-
ficient. “Our hospital, or rather our House of Carnage,
beggars all description,’ wrote General Wayne to his
superior, ‘“‘and shocks all humanity to visit; there is no
medicine or regimen suitable for the sick, no beds or straw
to lie on, no covering to keep them warm other than their
own thin wretched clothing.”

Nor did things seem to improve with time. ‘Our men
are almost naked,” declared General Greene in 1782, “‘for
want of overalls and shirts and the greater part of the
army barefoot.” The plight of the cavalry was no better.
Seeing a Virginia regiment ride by, an eyewitness recorded:
“Some had one boot, some hoseless with their feet peering
out of their shoes, others in breeches that put decency to
blush, some in short jackets, others in long coats—all how-
ever with dragoon caps.” Of course conditions were not al-
ways as bad but in the best of circumstances they were bad
enough to try the soul of the most devoted patriot. The
weaker vessels succumbed, deserting in shoals; neither
flogging nor threats of the gallows stayed their flight.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 273

The militiamen, both those associated with the regulars
and the independents, gave their officers trouble without
end. In more than one test, they proved to be unreliable
under fire. At the battle of Long Island whole brigades,
as Washington reported, ‘‘on the appearance of the enemy

. ran away in the greatest confusion without firing a
shot.” After the disaster, he found them “dismayed, in-
tractable, and impatient,” angry at ‘‘almost every kind of
restraint and government,” and demoralizing to the rest
of the army. ‘I am obliged to confess my want of confi-
dence in the generality of the troops,’”’ he exclaimed in his
report to the Congress. When called upon, the militia
frequently would not turn out at all or it rallied with such
sloth and indifference as to vex the soul of the Commander-
in-chief.

At the end of 1776, after more than a year’s experience,
he complained to Congress that his volunteers “come in, you
cannot tell how; go, you cannot tell when, and act, you
cannot tell where, consume your provisions, exhaust your
stores, and leave you at last at a critical moment.” And
yet, in the final year of the serious fighting, namely in 1781,
more than half the thirty thousand men under arms were
outside the ranks of the regulars. There were, of course,
many exceptions to the rule but Washington had good
reason for his lack of confidence in raw, undisciplined sol-
diers, often more interested in saving their skins and getting
home than in the iron game of war, particularly if the fight-
ing occurred beyond their own locality.

When, long afterward, a United States army officer,
General Emory Upton, struck the military balance sheet
of the revolutionary army, he had to report a story that
shocked those Americans who had supposed that embattled
farmers fresh from the plow or hearth overcame the weight
of the British Empire. In his laconic record the facts stood
out with impressive boldness. When the struggle began a
great crowd of patriotic volunteers rushed to the scene of
excitement, but as soon as they got a thorough taste of

274 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

bloodshed and death, masses of them showed a remarkable
affection for their homes and safety.

During the remainder of the war, it was only by the most
heroic efforts that a force of thirty or forty thousand pri-
vates, out of a population of three million people, could be
kept in the field. Long before the end, it became necessary
to make generous grants of money and land for the purpose
of enticing men into the service. One of the Southern
states, for example, offered to each volunteer as a bounty
‘‘a healthy sound negro between the ages of ten and thirty
years, or sixty pounds in gold and silver at the option of the
soldier.’ Put to desperate straits in their search for men,
the states enlisted free Negroes in substantial numbers and
enrolled slaves who had been freed on condition that they
enter the army; in 1778 it was officially estimated that there
were on the average fifty-four Negroes in each of Wash-
ington’s battalions.

Indeed, the states found it so hard in some cases to fill
their quotas that they even employed fugitives from the
British army to fight for them. ‘It gives me inexpressible
concern,’ lamented Washington in a letter to Massachu-
setts, ‘‘to have repeated information from the best author-
ity that the committees of the different towns and districts
in your state hire deserters from General Burgoyne’s army
and employ them as substitutes to excuse the personal serv-
ice of the inhabitants.’”’ All in all, it had to be said that the
cause of American independence was won in the field by
the invincible fortitude and unconquerable devotion of a
relatively small body of soldiers and officers who kept the
faith to the iast hour. When victory crowned their long
labors they were given sheaves of paper notes and turned
loose upon the tender mercies of a chilly world. Nothing
but the most persistent efforts of the soldiers and their
friends eventually wrung from the negligent civilians in
Congress a tardy recognition of the valorous services that
had made a reality out of the paper Declaration of
Independence.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 275
§

Against the contentious governments which rose on the
ruins of British dominion in America and against the small
and badly supported forces of the American army was
pitted the might of the greatest empire in the world.
Unlike the Continental Congress, the British political sys-
tem was powerfully organized, the Parliament at West-
minster commanding the purses and allegiance of its sub-
jects. The British navy, ruling the sea, could transport
men and supplies across the ocean or along the coast with
comparative ease. Moreover, King George, besides having
at his disposal a substantial body of regular soldiers dis-
ciplined in the arts of war, could also summon to his aid a
number of high officers who, if they were not supreme mas-
ters of strategy, had at least seen more serious fighting than
Washington and his subordinates. How then was it possi- |
ble for the thirteen states, weak and divided in councils,
to effect their independence in the test of arms?

In the enumeration of the items that go to make up the
answer, all historians agree in assigning first rank to the
personality of Washington, commander of the weary and
footsore Continental army that clung to the cause to the
bitter end. Mythology, politics, and hero-worship did their
utmost to make a solemn humbug of that amazing figure
but his character finally survived the follies of his admirers
and even the thrusts of his detractors made in their re-
action to idolatrous adulation. Washington was a giant in
stature, a tireless and methodical worker, a firm ruler yet
without the ambitions of a Cesar or a Cromwell, a
soldier who faced hardships and death without flinching,
a steadfast patriot, a hard-headed and practical director of
affairs. Technicians have long disputed the skill of his
strategy; some have ascribed the length of the war to his
procrastinations; others have found him wanting in energy
and decision; but all have agreed that he did the one thing
essential to victory—he kept some kind of an army in the

276 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

field in adversity as well as in prosperity and rallied about it
the scattered and uncertain forces of a jealous and individ-
ualistic people.

Fortunately for Washington and for the cause of inde-
pendence there were elements of weakness in the armed
might of Great Britain. The English landed gentry and
the mercantile classes that shouted for ‘“‘strong measures
in America”’ did not rush to the standard to fight the battles
for which they had called. Long protected against invasion
by means of the navy, the British people had not been nour-
ished on the martial spirit. For generations, therefore, the
Crown had found it imperative to employ brusque methods
in order to secure enough men to fill the ranks of its
regular army.

Theoretically it relied mainly on volunteers; practically
the statutes and the common law sanctioned a disorderly
kind of conscription, two expedients which yielded soldiers
of about the same type. The volunteers were drawn chiefly
from a miserable proletariat; while the men who were
dragooned into the uniform by compulsion, drink, and vio-
lence came from what the English historian, Lecky, called
“the dregs of the population.” The laws pertaining to
conscription specifically authorized the snatching of sturdy
beggars, fortune tellers, idle, unknown, and suspected fel-
lows, incorrigible rogues, poachers, and convicts. Crim-
inals were pardoned ‘‘on condition of their enlistment in
His Majesty’s army,” three British regiments being com-
posed entirely of lawbreakers released from prison. _

But all these methods failed to produce enough men for
the task of saving America for the landlords and merchants
of England. Six months after the battle of Lexington, the
British government confessed that its efforts to fill the ranks
had failed. ‘Thereupon ‘‘the King went into the open mar-
ket for troops on the continent,” and hired from German
princes several thousand fighting men—peasants dragged
from their fields, mechanics snatched by crimps, and
wretches raked up from the highways and byways.

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 277

In the wake of the British army followed the usual rear-
guard of wastrels. Burgoyne’s forces were accompanied
by approximately two thousand women, some of them the
wives of officers, three hundred ‘‘on the strength of the
regiments,” the remainder “fed and maintained by the
soldiers themselves.’”’ Although there were good fighting
men in the British ranks, although some of the criminal
regiments distinguished themselves for valor, the most
friendly historian of the British army had to admit that it
was not inspired by an intense desire to overwhelm the
American rebels at any cost of life and limb.

The British officers, of course, were drawn from a dif-
ferent class but for one reason or another those placed in
command in America were lacking in skill or energy or both.
Sir William Howe, on whom a large part of the burden fell,
though a general of experience and distinction, suffered
from many disabilities. He had strenuously opposed the
coercive measures which brought on the war and he had
publicly declared that he would not fight the Americans
if called upon to take up arms. And yet, after making such
professions, he had yielded to the appeal of his sovereign
and accepted the command. Just why he was chosen for
the important post in view of his attitude has never been
made clear but it was hinted at the time that he owed the
honor to his “grandmother’s frailty,” that is, to the fact
that he was the grandson of George I through an illegiti-
mate connection.

However that may be, Howe was a gay man of the world,
loving ease, wine, gambling, and the society of ladies. ‘‘In
Boston,” as the Americans were fond of saying, ‘‘this Brit-
ish Anthony found his Cleopatra.’ Competent critics
ascribed his final discomfiture to the “baneful influence” of
‘this illustrious courtesan.” Enamored of indolence, drink,
and high living, eager to effect peace by conciliation, Howe
shrank from ruthless, swift, persistent, punitive measures.
He proceeded on the theory that, by the continued posses-
sion of New York and Philadelphia and by the blockade

278 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of the coast, he could wear out the patriots. If the French
had not intervened with their navy, he might have suc-
ceeded in his plan and been hailed as one of the far-seeing
statesmen and warriors of his age. But events sank his
fortunes beyond recovery. Sir Henry Clinton, who suc-
ceeded Howe as Commander-in-chief in 1778, if more active
in war, was not much happier in the display of military
talents; and of Lord Cornwallis, the less said the better.
Among the other factors favorable to the American cause
were advantages due to the geographical situation. The
British had to cross three thousand miles of water and then
fight on a field that stretched almost a thousand miles north
and south merging in the west into a wilderness. With the
aid of the navy they could readily seize the ports and strike
at the seaboard commerce; although they were definitely
forced out of Boston in 1776—in spite of their costly vic-
tory at Bunker Hill—they occupied, in the course of the
war, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah.
All these places, except Philadelphia, they continued to hold
until Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown and their grip on
that city was only broken by the menace of the French fleet.
When, however, they ventured far into the interior they
met reverses or achieved only temporary victories. Bur-
goyne was compelled to surrender at Saratoga because he
was surrounded, harassed, and cut off from his base of
supplies. The British captured Charleston in 1780 and,
after beating Gates at Camden, overran most of the state,
but whenever they pushed far from their sea support, they
were assailed and worried by militiamen. Cornwallis could
ravage the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia almost
at will; he could even strike far into the interior and give
Greene a drubbing at Guilford, but he could not hold the
hinterland over which he had raised his flag. As soon as
his troops were withdrawn, revolutionary forces took pos-
session of the abandoned territory. In short, the conquest
of the American continent by arms called for continuous
occupation and for regular government by military process

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 279

—a gigantic task to which the British forces dispatched to
America were not equal.

In reckoning the elements that brought victory to the
United States, the aid afforded by France must be given
great weight. Money received from the treasury of Louis
XVI paid for supplies that were desperately needed and
buoyed up the sinking credit of the young republic. After
the fashion of adventurous military men, French officers
with the Marquis de la Fayette and Baron de Kalb in the
lead joined Baron Steuben of Prussia, Count Pulaski, and
Thaddeus Kosciusko of Poland, in helping to furnish in-
spiration and discipline for the raw recruits from American
farms and shops. French regulars dispatched to American
camps and fields, besides giving heart to the discouraged
forces under Washington’s command, rendered a good ac-
count of themselves in the business of warfare. At York-
town, the last scene in the grand enterprise, the French
soldiers, almost equal to the Americans in number, stood
like a rock against the attempts of Cornwallis to break the
cordon of \ besieging, armies: Oni) the) sea; .as’ony the
land, the power of France, in spite of England’s superior
strength, counted heavily on the side of victory for Amer-
ica. French captains united with American naval com-
manders headed by Paul Jones and John Barry in preying
upon British commerce, in cutting off ships bearing fresh
troops and supplies to Yorktown, and in blockading Corn-
wallis on the side of the sea. Thus when the final blow
was delivered—the blow which brought the British cabinet
to terms—the honors were shared by the French and
American arms. Once more the balance of power had been
utilized, this time in ushering a young republic into the
family of nations.

§

In trying to explain the outcome of the war for inde-
pendence many writers, old and new, have laid great stress
on the argument that the English nation showed little zeal

280 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

for the fighting throughout the long contest. Some have
gone so far as to represent the efforts to coerce the colonies
by arms as the labors of an arrogant king and subservient
ministers who enjoyed little support among the English
people at large. Indeed, the Whig historians in England
and their copyists in America have laid the main responsi-
bility for the conduct of the war, as well as the measures
that led to it, upon George III himself. Sir Thomas Er-
skine May, a Whig of the Whigs, in his Constitutional His-
tory of England issued in 1871, represented the King as
managing Parliament during all the contest, distributing
patronage, dictating domestic and foreign policies, directing
debates, conferring titles and honors, and settling the fate
of ministers, in the grand and arbitrary fashion of Louis
the Great. ‘It is not without reason,” he concluded, “‘that
this deplorable contest was called the king’s war.’ John
Richard Green, describing the North administration in his
Short History of the English People, published in 1874,
declared that ‘‘George was in fact the minister through the
twelve years of its existence, from 1770 till the close of the
American war.’’

Many years later another English Liberal, Sir George
Trevelyan, a nephew of the great Whig apologist, Ma-
caulay, made a special effort to collect proofs that ‘‘the war
itself was disliked by the nation.”” From the evidence as-
sembled he showed that the members of the Commons from
London were opposed to the war, that several officers in
the British army and navy refused to take part in it, that
an open opponent was almost elected to Parliament in
Newcastle at a by-election held in 1779 while the conflict
was raging, that British consols fell in price, and that there
was a great deal of outspoken criticism of the government
which would hardly have been tolerated if armed coercion
of America had been popular.

Without attempting to traverse that general argument,
it is appropriate to recall certain facts equally significant
which point to a contrary conclusion. It is true that George

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 281

III displayed a lively interest in the proceedings of Parlia-
ment, that he indulged in high-flown language about his
prerogatives, that he used his power to penalize men who
opposed measures on which his heart was set, that he ap-
pointed his friends to high offices, and that on one occasion
with a somewhat childish gesture he pointed to his sword
and threatened to use it if a dissolution of Parliament was
forced upon him. But the Whig historians who have raked
over every word of the king’s correspondence have found
no passage showing that George III used his authority to
force the enactment of a single coercive law directed against
the American colonies.

In reality no such course on his part was necessary for,
as the judicious Lecky shows, ‘‘all the measures of Amer-
ican coercion that preceded the Declaration of Independ-
ence were carried by enormous majorities in Parliament.”
And he might have added that all the war measures passed
after that event were likewise carried by enormous majori-
ties. As a matter of fact the one conspicuous use of royal
power over Parliament during the conflict was in the case
of Lord North’s conciliatory resolution offering ‘‘the olive
branch” to America in 1775: the proposal was so hotly
resisted in the Commons that the king’s influence was
invoked to push it through. No doubt George III was
outspoken in vindicating the course of his government. He
once declared that he would accept no minister who favored
stopping the war or granting American independence; but
a year before he uttered these emphatic words he had
actually offered to accept a ministry of peace and independ-
ence. So it would seem that the verdict of the Whig
historians needs revising; the responsibility for the war, as
far as England was concerned, rested mainly on the govern-
ing classes, not upon George III alone.

How far the English “nation” approved the prosecution
of the war was never determined by anything like a refer-
endum. ‘The general election of 1774, held while the
controversy with the colonies was raging, sustained the

282 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ministry of Lord North and gave him a thumping majority.
Normally, in the course of the conflict, he could muster in
the House of Commons about two hundred and sixty votes
against the ninety arrayed on the side of the opposition.
Beyond all question the landed gentry were solidly en-
trenched in support of the government and, if Edmund
Burke is to be taken as an authority, the industrial and
mercantile groups were almost equally stanch in their
loyalty. ‘The mercantile interest,” he lamented in Jan-
uary, 1775, ‘which ought to have supported with efficacy
and power the opposition to the fatal cause of all this
mischief, was pleaded against us, and we were obliged to
stoop under the accumulated weight of all the interests
of this kingdom.”

Later in the same year Burke made again the same com-
plaint: ‘“The merchants are gone from us and from them-
selves. . . . The leading men among them are kept full
fed with contracts and remittances and jobs of all descrip-
tions and are indefatigable in their endeavours to keep the
others quiet... . They all, or the greatest number of
them, begin to sniff the cadaverous haut gout of lucrative
war.” Burke also found “‘the generality of the people of
England” aligned with the ministers in the prosecution of
the war—deluded no doubt by ‘“‘the misrepresentations and
arts of the ministry, the Court, and its abettors,” but still
loyal to the government in its hour of battle. Long after
Burke, Lecky, on reviewing a huge mass of testimony, ren-
dered a similar judgment: “It appears to me evident that
in 1775 and 1776 the preponderating opinion, or at least
the opinion of the most powerful and most intelligent
classes in the community, on the American question was
with the King and his ministers.”’

Certainly the bishops of the Established Church sus-
tained the government and the Universities proclaimed
their unquestioning fealty, while the lawyers as a class
found historic and constitutional grounds for supporting
the proceedings of the ministry. To give verbal expression

INDEPENDENCE AND. CIVIL CONFLICT 283

to official policy, a large group of editors, clergymen,
economists, historians, and men of letters devoted their
talents, either through conviction or for a consideration,
to fanning the temper of those determined to bring the
revolutionists to the ground at all costs. Dr. Samuel
Johnson, a royal pensioner, hurled against the Americans
a weighty diatribe, Taxation no Tyranny; according to the
faithful Boswell, ‘this inflammable corruption” burst into
horrid fire whenever the Americans were mentioned; he
breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them ras.
cals, robbers, pirates, and exclaiming that he would burn
and destroy them—this safely in a tavern corner in front
of a roast and a pot of ale.

John Wesley, whose varied and dubious career in
America had taught him the nature of American emotions,
joined the ministerial hosts in condemning the Revolution
and attributing colonial resistance to the writings of wicked
Englishmen, such as Burke, who were encouraging rebel-
lion and striving to overturn the perfect English constitu-
tion. With serene assurance, Wesley informed the Amer-
icans that they had no case at all, waving aside the issues
of taxation and representation with a short fling: ‘You
are the descendants of men who either had not votes or
resigned them by migration. You have therefore exactly
what your ancestors left you; not a vote in making laws
nor in choosing legislators but the happiness of being pro-
tected by laws and the duty of obeying them.’ The great
Edward Gibbon, then at work on his history of the Roman
tragedy, though inclined at first to criticize Lord North’s
policy, after gazing a while upon the contemporary game
with a stately amusement, went over to the support of the
government, receiving in the going a sinecure of a thou-
sand pounds a year, which helped to eke out his slender
income and enabled him to enjoy fine wine while finishing
off his immortal pages. Yet he was good natured about
the business and, as he said, laughed and blushed at his
own inconsequence when he heard himself lashed by Burke

284 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

for drawing public money in return for nothing but
mischief.

On the other side of the controversy in England there
was, no doubt, a troublesome opposition that continued to
bait the government until the close of the War for Inde-
pendence. Among the leaders in this group Edmund
Burke stood first in discernment, combining an accurate
knowledge of American economy and American temper
with a profound faith in the healing power of toleration
and generosity—a faith that strangely contrasted with the
scurrilous dogmatism manifest in his thunderous pamphlets
“on the French Revolution a little later. Unlike Chatham,
who, as his sister often said, “knew nothing accurately ex-
cept Spenser’s Faery Queen,’’ Burke had the statistics of
American trade and the history of American progress
always on the tip of his tongue. Repeatedly he pointed out
in the House of Commons the magnitude of American
commerce, the growth of population, the fierce spirit of
liberty in the colonies, ‘‘the dissidence of dissent’? in mat-
ters religious, the rise of lawyers ‘‘acute, inquisitive, dex-
terous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of re-
sources,” the growth of popular government through local
assemblies, the feebleness of the Established Church, and
the high proud spirit of Southern slaveholders. Having
described the power of America, he told his countrymen
that coercion would bring nothing but resistance and revolt.

The burden of Burke’s grand argument flowed from rea-
son and moderation. ‘The relations of nations, he urged,
must be considered in the same fashion as personal rela-
tions with respect to sensibilities; generosity will call forth
generosity; human affairs cannot be twisted to fit any dog-
matic scheme of black and white; great good can come out
of liberty unbidden by tyrannical rule and systematic
policy; the “unsuspecting confidence of the colonists” is.
the best hope of prosperous connections; refined, hair-
splitting policy is always the parent of confusion; govern-
ment must be based on barter and compromise; plain, good

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 285

intention is a great force in the management of mankind;
wise governments take into account the nature and circum-
stance of those who are governed; prudent negotiation is
better than force; if force you must have, let it be for some
defined object worthy of the sword, not the outcome of
foolish arrogance; reverence for black letter learning, for
precise constitutional rights, is reverence for a Serbonian
bog where whole armies have sunk; “‘it is not what a lawyer
tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice
tell me I ought to do.”’ In such noble words was expressed
the serene, friendly, tolerant spirit in which Burke begged
the British government to turn back upon its course to the
old ways that were followed before Grenville and Town-
shend started their ‘‘systematic imperial policy.”

Outside Parliament, Burke had some literary support.
David Hume, philosopher and historian, objected to
‘mauling the poor unfortunate Americans in the other
hemisphere.” At the beginning of the conflict, Catherine
Macaulay, sister of the mayor of London and a historical]
writer, then the vogue in England and the subject of ‘‘flat-
tering attentions” in Paris, lauded the American cause and
sent a letter to Washington encouraging him in the course
he had chosen. In another quarter, the celebrated Dr.
Richard Price, nonconformist clergyman, whose sermon
on constitutional reform later called forth Burke’s Reflec-
tions on the French Revolution, defended the Americans
in a powerful tract that quickly passed through eight
editions and made a profound impression on the British
public, especially on the dissenting elements.

In the houses of Parliament, Burke’s attacks on minis-
terial policies were applauded by a small but distinguished
body of Whigs. Whether their contrariety of opinion
flowed principally from resentment at exclusion from office.
or from a confirmed belief in the injustice of war on Amer-
ica, it was impossible to determine. Indeed, there was
no unanimity of doctrine among them. Chatham, for
example, declared that Parliament had no constitutional

286 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

right to impose internal taxes on the colonies and favored
the repeal of the coercive measures; but he was dead set
against granting independence after the armed conflict had
begun. Rockingham, on the other hand, upheld with de-
cided vigor the right of Parliament to tax, assailing the
measures of Lord North on grounds of expediency.

Great as it was intrinsically, the confusion of the Whigs
was increased by the demands of the colonists. Committed
by a long tradition to the creed that the power of the
Crown should be reduced and the authority of the legisla-
ture exalted, the Whigs found themselves invited by Ameri-
can agitators to condemn acts of Parliament in the name of
royal prerogative. Not only that, they were called upon
by Benjamin Franklin to treat parliamentary interference
with America as sheer usurpation—an invasion of the
king’s undoubted sphere of power—and then they were
asked by the authors of the Declaration of Independence to
lay the blame for the disaster on George III.

Although a few Whigs made a clean cut through this
legal verbiage by discarding the niceties of logic and advo-
cating peace with America on terms of independence, the
majority employed it chiefly with reference to the tactics
of defeating the ministry and restoring their party to its old
control over government and patronage. Of this, there
was indisputable proof. In 1778, in the midst of the war,
George III was ready to give up; in his name the Whigs
were offered ‘“‘the majority in a new cabinet under Lord
Weymouth, on the basis of a withdrawal of the troops from
America and a vigorous prosecution of the war with
France.”

Then and there the Whigs could have ended the armed
conflict with America. Fox begged them to do it but they
refused, thus taking on their own heads responsibility for
the war which they denounced, allowing it to go on to the
conclusion so bitter for England. On no simple theory of
devotion to American principles, therefore, could the course
of Whig politics during the American Revolution be ex-

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 287

plained, and yet the generous peace of 1783 was in the
main their work. In the end it was they who drove Lord
North from office, urged George III to yield to necessity,
and closed the unhappy quarrel by accepting the United
States as one of the free nations of the earth.

§

The negotiation of the treaty of peace, when the moment
came, was a delicate task for Franklin and his colleagues
at Paris, as well as for the British government. Under
instructions from the Congress and the terms of the French
alliance, the American agents were bound to consult Louis
XVI's ministers at every stage of the transaction. Had
nothing intervened, Franklin, easy-going and fond of the
French, might have obeyed to the letter the canons of strict
propriety, but John Jay, fresh from the intrigues of
Madrid, and John Adams, who had learned new tactics
at The Hague, were too canny for the diplomacy of Ver-
sailles. “They knew that France and Spain had not shed
blood and. spent treasure merely to erect a powerful re-
public in the western hemisphere. It was no dark mystery
that France, still cherishing imperial dreams, hoped to
recover the Mississippi Valley and enlarge her fishing
rights in western waters. It was no secret that Spain also
had irons in the fire. In any event, both powers agreed
that the Americans should be satisfied with the seaboard
and were prepared to block American designs upon the
hinterland.

Called upon to favor the United States, on the one hand,
or the French and Spanish, on the other, the British min-
istry chose to patronize the rebellious provinces. More-
over, the new colonial secretary in London sincerely desired
‘reconciliation with America on the noblest terms and by
the noblest means.’’ Quick to grasp the realities of the
problem thus presented, the American commissioners art-
fully disregarded the decorum of the occasion. Besides

288 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

holding secret conversations with the British agent, they
actually agreed upon the general terms of peace before
they told the French foreign minister about their opera-
tions. For this furtive conduct, Louis XVI’s minister, Ver-
gennes, on hearing the news at last, reproached Franklin,
only to receive from the aged gentleman the suave reply
that, although the Americans had been guilty of bad man-
ners, they hoped that the great work would not be ruined
by ‘‘a single indiscretion.”’ Doubtless the French were
angry; perhaps, technically, they had a right to be; but
those who practiced the arts of diplomacy in those days
were usually prepared to accept the rules of the game and
the hazards of the combat.

In the end, the shrewd maneuvers of the American com-
missioners and the liberality of the English cabinet made
the general settlement at Paris in 1783 a triumph for the
United States. Independence was specifically recognized
by the mother country; and the coveted territory west to
the Mississippi, north to Canada, and south to the Floridas
was acknowledged as the rightful heritage of the young
republic. Spain won Minorca and the Floridas but not
Gibraltar. For her sacrifices in blood and treasure, France
gained practically nothing in territory and commerce, but
had the satisfaction of seeing the British Empire dismem-
bered and the balance of power readjusted. In spite of her
defeat in America, England retained Canada, Newfound-
land, and her islands in the West Indies, made gains in
India, and held her supremacy on the sea.

Clear as it was in bold outline, the grand adjustment at
Paris left many issues clouded. Not unnaturally, the
Tories demanded a return of their sequestered estates and
English merchants insisted on the payment of debts owed
by American citizens. These were sore points with the
patriots and nothing but a compromise was possible. In
its final form, the treaty provided that the Congress should
advise the states to restore the property they had con-
fiscated and stipulated that no lawful impediment should be

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 289

placed in the way of collecting just debts—smooth promises
dificult to fulfill, In a counter-claim, the Americans
demanded a restoration of all goods and slaves seized by
the English army during the war, and in the terms of the
treaty their exactions were conceded. Here, too, was a
pledge easier to make than to discharge; for some of the
English were horrified at the idea of sending human beings
back to bondage and the recovery of the other property
claimed by the patriots proved to be impossible in practice.
For good measure, the question of fishing rights off the
coast offered irritating problems; issues which vexed the
two countries for more than a hundred years.

Many a patriot grumbled when he heard that the treaty
promised a return of Tory property and a payment of debts
but all such laments were lost in the universal rejoicing
that greeted the close of the war. Nothing dampened the
ardor of the demonstration. Orators exhausted their
forensic powers in portraying the benefits of independence
and in framing taunts to the despotisms of the Old World.
One preacher, climbing an Alpine peak, summoned his
countrymen to look upon the fair opportunity now pre-
sented ‘‘for converting this immense northern continent into
a seat of knowledge and freedom, of agriculture and com-
merce, of useful arts and manufactures, of Christian piety
and virtue; and thus making it an inviting and comfortable
abode for many millions of the human species; an asylum
for the injured and oppressed in all parts of the globe; the
delight of God and good men; the joy and pride of the
whole earth; soaring on the wings of literature, wealth,
population, religion, virtue, and everything that is excel-
lent and happy to a greater height of perfection and glory
than the world has ever yet seen!”’

§

The fair prophecy of the preacher, to be fulfilled in a
surprising measure in the long reach of time, seemed at

290 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the moment to rest on a slender basis. The ‘‘America’’ to
which the orator paid tribute was only in the process of
making. Politically, it consisted of thirteen independent
states, each jealous of its rights, fiercely claiming the loy-
alty of its citizens, and dominated by ambitious men. The
union that bound them together, such as it was, had no
guarantee of permanence in the affections of the people.
It was new. It had been a product of necessity, long debate,
and grudging consent. The idea of an enduring associa-
tion, raised in the Continental Congress many months
before the Declaration of Independence, was not given a
concrete form in the Articles of Confederation until more
than a year after that event. The autumn of 1777 was
far advanced when the Congress, after tedious argument,
finally agreed on the document and sent it to the states for
ratification. ‘Though all the local legislatures were aware
that their common fate seemed to hang upon prompt and
united action, a long time passed before the last of them
signed and sealed the instrument of federation. The year
that saw the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown had
opened when Maryland, the remaining laggard, gave her
approval. It was March 1, 1781, that thundering guns
from ships of war in the Delaware announced that the
Union ‘begun by necessity’ had been “indissolubly ce-
mented.”

The Articles of Confederation, wrung from reluctant
delegates in the Congress and from still more reluctant
states, in fact made little difference in the system which had
been established for revolutionary purposes. It did not
materially alter the structure or powers of the continental
government created provisionally in 1774. Management
of the general interests of the United States was still vested,
under the Articles, as before, in a Congress composed of
delegates from each state, appointed as the legislature
might direct, subject to recall at any time, and paid from
the local treasury.

If this system seemed strangely inadequate to the re-

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 291

quirements of a potential nation, it corresponded with
marked fidelity to the ideas of the radicals who had engi-
neered the Revolution. In their several colonies, they had
revolted against the financial, commercial, and_ political
control exercised by the government of Great Britain; by
war they had destroyed deliberately that dominion; and
they wanted no strong and effective substitute in the form
of a central government—even one controlled by Amer-
icans. In this sense a fundamental transformation had
been wrought in the higher ranges of continental politics.

Within each state, no less than in external relations, the
Revolution started a dislocation of authority—a phase of
the eventful years which the historians, too long concen-
trating on spectacular episodes, have just begun to appre-
ciate. [he shifts and cracks in the social structure pro-
duced by the cataclysm were not all immediately evident;
half a century passed before the leveling democracy pro-
claimed in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence came
flooding into power. But still the states of the confedera-
tion differed as much from the colonial provinces of Gov-
ernor Shirley’s time as the France of Louis Philippe, hero
of the green umbrella, did from the régime of Louis XV.
Just as the French Revolution sent émigrés fleeing into
Germany and England, so the American Revolution drove
out about one hundred thousand high Tories of the old
school. By breaking the grip of English economic and
political adventurers on the spoils of America, it brought
into power new men with new principles and standards of
conduct.

It is true that, in the severe and sometimes savage con-
tests between the conservative and radical supporters of
the Revolution, the former were generally the victors for
the moment and were able to write large their views of
economic rights in the first state constitutions. Broadly
speaking, only taxpayers or property owners were given
the ballot as in colonial times and only men of substantial
wealth were made eligible to public office. But in many

292 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

cases the qualifications were lowered and the structure of
the old social system seriously undermined.

Above all, the spirit of domestic politics, especially in
the royal provinces, was distinctly altered by the sudden
removal of the British ruling class—a class accustomed to
a barbarous criminal code, a narrow and intolerant univer-
sity system, a government conceived as a huge aggregation
of jobs and privileges, a contempt for men and women who
toiled in field and shop, a denial of education to the masses,
an Established religion forced alike on Dissenters and
Catholics, a dominion of squire and parson in counties and
villages, callous brutality in army and navy, a scheme of
primogeniture buttressing the rule of the landed gentry,
a swarm of hungry placemen offering sycophancy to the
king in exchange for offices, sinecures, and pensions, and a
constitution of church and state so ordered as to fasten
upon the masses this immense pile of pride and plunder.
From the weight of this mountain the American revolu-
tionists delivered the colonial subjects of the British
Crown. Within a decade or two after that emancipation
they accomplished reforms in law and policy which re-
quired a hundred years or more of persistent agitation to
effect in the mother country—reforms which gave to the
statesmen who led in the agitation their title to immortality
in English history.

Naturally the American Revolution, a movement carried
to its bitter end by the bayonets of fighting farmers, even
though it was started by protesting merchants and rioting
mechanics, wrought a far-reaching transformation in the
land system that had been developed under British inspira-
tion and control. With engaging conciseness, these changes
have been summarized in J. Franklin Jameson’s admirable
little book on The American Revolution Considered as a
Social Movement. First of all, royal limitations on the
seizure and enjoyment of vacant lands—notably the pro-
hibition upon the free settlement of regions beyond the
Alleghenies contained in the proclamation of 1763—Wwere

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 293

swept away; and at the same time the “‘vast domains of the
Crown” were vested in the hands of the state legislatures
to be dedicated to the uses of their constituents.

Secondly, the quitrents paid to the king and to proprie-
tary families, the Penns and the Baltimores, by farmers
and planters according to their acreage were simply abol-
ished, relieving Americans of an annual charge approxi-
mating a hundred thousand dollars a year. ‘Thirdly, the
rule and the practice of reserving for the royal navy white
pine trees suitable for masts were abrogated without cere-
mony, releasing landowners from an irksome restriction.
In the fourth place, there was a smashing confiscation of
Tory estates, including Sir William Pepperell’s Maine
holdings extending thirty miles along the coast, the Phil-
lipse heritage in New York embracing about three hundred
square miles, the property of the Penn family worth in
round numbers five million dollars, and the Fairfax estate
in Virginia stretching out like a province. All in all, the
Tories reckoned their losses at no less than forty million
dollars and the British Parliament, after scaling their
demands to the minimum, granted the claimants fifteen
million dollars by way of compensation.

In harmony with their principles, the Revolutionists who
made this huge sequestration of property distributed the
land by sales in small lots on generous terms to enterprising
farmers. ‘The principality of Roger Morris in New York,
for example, was divided into no less than two hundred and
fifty parcels, while a still larger number of farms was
created out of the confiscated holdings of James De Lancey.

Finally, among the effects of the Revolution on agricul-
tural economy, must be reckoned the abolition of the system
of entails and primogeniture. Whereas it took a century
of debate and then the corroding taxes of a World War to
drive a wedge into the concentrated land monopoly of Eng-
land, the American Revolutionists brought many an ancient
structure to earth by swift and telling blows. Three months
after he penned the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson

294 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

opened a war on the entailed estates of the Old Dominion,
to the horror of the best people; and before the lapse of a
year he pushed through the legislature an act which accom-
plished his radical design, releasing from entail ‘‘at least
half, and possibly three-quarters of the entire ‘seated’ area
of Virginia.” Within ten years ‘“‘every state had abolished
entails excepting two, and those were two in which entails
were rare. In fifteen years every state, without exception,
abolished primogeniture’’—all save four placing daughters
on an equality with sons in the distribution of landed in-
heritances.

Considered relatively, therefore, the destruction of
landed privilege in America by the forces unchained in the
War for Independence was perhaps as great and as sig-
nificant as the change wrought in the economic status of
the clergy and nobility during the holocaust of the French
Revolution. As in France country lawyers and newly rich
merchants swarmed over the seats of the once proud aris-
tocracy, so in the United States during and after the cata-
clysm a host of groundlings fresh from the plow and count-
ing house surged over the domains of the Jessups, De Lan-
ceys, and Morrises. When members of the best families of
France turned to tutoring and translating in London for
a livelihood or to teaching dancing and manners in America,
in the days of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, they found
ladies and gentlemen who sighed for good old colonial days
ready to join them in cursing the rights of man.

The clergy as well as the landed gentry felt the shocks
of the American Revolution. When the crisis opened, nine
of the thirteen colonies had established churches. In New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut it was the
Congregationalists that enjoyed this legal privilege, while
in Virginia, Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, and
Georgia it was the Episcopalians who claimed a monopoly
on religion supported by taxes. Before the echoes of Lex-
ington and Concord had died away, an attack on ecclesias-
tical establishments was launched, and in five of the states

INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL CONFLICT 295

where the Anglican clergy possessed privileges and immuni-
ties under the law the dissenters, outnumbering their oppo-
nents, were quickly victorious. In Virginia, however, where
the Anglican party was strong, and in New England, where
the Congregationalists enjoyed a supremacy, every clerical
redoubt was stubbornly defended.

It took a struggle of more than half a century in the
mother country to win political equality for Catholics and
Dissenters, and to sweep away tithes for the support of an
official religion. The twentieth century opened before
France, going beyond England in her evolution, could put
asunder Church and State. Only ten years sufficed to
carry through the legislature Jefferson’s ‘“‘Statute of Vir-
ginia for Religious Freedom,” and before the nineteenth
century had far advanced, the Congregationalists were
finally disestablished—in New Hampshire in 1817, in Con-
necticut the following year, and in Massachusetts in 1833.
So before Jefferson’s death Episcopalians could enjoy in
Connecticut liberties they had once withheld in Virginia.

In law as in religion the light of reason was being turned
on ancient customs. During this stirring period of intel-
lectual and spiritual awakening, the British government was
making its penal code more and more savage; when George
III came to the throne in 1760 there were about one
hundred and sixty offenses for which men, women, and
children were put to death; before the end of his reign
nearly one hundred new offenses were added to this appal-
ling list.

Although the American colonists had never been so
sweeping in their vengeful passions as English lawmakers,
they too had adopted penal codes of shocking brutality—
codes that loomed black and ominous against the new faith
in the common run of mankind. Deeply moved by this in-
congruity, the impetuous Jefferson, to whom at least his
Declaration was no mere mass of glittering generalities,
hastened away from Philadelphia soon after independence
to start the revolution in the legal system of Virginia. On

296 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

his arrival he announced that the law must be reformed
root and branch “with a single eye to reason and the good
of those for whose government it was framed,” so alarm-
ing the bench and bar by his rashness that it took him
twenty years to gain his principal points. In the other
states a similar campaign was waged against the barbarities
of the statute books, now swiftly, now tardily casting into
oblivion great fragments of the cruel heritage. Even at
the worst the emancipated colonists were in most matters
respecting criminal legislation half a century ahead of the
mother country.

Indeed, in nearly every branch of enlightened activity, in
every sphere of liberal thought, the American Revolution
marked the opening of a new humane epoch. Slavery, of
course, afforded a glaring contrast to the grand doctrines
of the Revolution, but still it must be noted that Jefferson
and his friends were painfully aware of the anachronism;
that Virginia prohibited the slave trade in 1778—a meas-
ure which the British Crown had vetoed twenty years be-
fore; that a movement for the abolition of slavery appeared
among the new social forces of the age; and that it was the
lofty doctrines of the Revolution which were invoked by
Lincoln when in the fullness of time chattel bondage was
to be finally broken. If a balance sheet is struck and the
rhetoric of the Fourth of July celebrations is discounted,
if the externals of the conflict are given a proper per-
spective in the background, then it is seen that the American
Revolution was more than a war on England. It was in
truth an economic, social, and intellectual transformation of
prime significance—the first of those modern world-shak-
ing reconstructions in which mankind has sought to cut and
fashion the tough and stubborn web of fact to fit the
pattern of its dreams.

CHAPTER VII

Populism and Reaction

EARLY nine years after the battle of Lexington, to

N be exact, on December 4, 1783, General Washing-
ton bade farewell to his officers in the great room

of Fraunces’ Tavern in New York City. When the simple
but moving ceremony was over, the Commander marched
down the streets through files of soldiers and throngs of
civilians to the barge at Whitehall Ferry that was to bear
him across the Hudson on his way home to Mount Vernon.
Cannon boomed, bells in the church steeples clashed, crowds
cheered as the tall Virginia gentleman stood in the boat,
bared his gray head, and bowed his final acknowledgments.
When his familiar form faded away on the Jersey shore,
the multitudes in the city turned to celebrating the triumph
of the Revolution. ‘The last of the British soldiers had
disappeared down the bay a few days before and the last
symbols of British dominion, except in the distant frontier
forts, had passed as in a dream. America was now an
independent republic. ‘Those who had assumed leadership
in this stirring drama found themselves in a course far

pew |

298 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

beyond all the headlands they had seen in the fateful hours
when the quarrel with the mother country was impending.
Undoubtedly a few bold thinkers had early envisaged inde-
pendence as the outcome of revolt but their little designs
had not encompassed its full import. Thus do the achieve-
ments of people outrun their conscious purposes.

§

In the march of events, profound social and political
changes had come to pass. Seven years of war, waged by
an improvised Continental Congress without traditions,
authority or strength, had thrown all economic functions
into confusion and disorganized society in every direction.
In colonial times the prosperity of the people depended
largely upon the exchange of raw materials for manufac-
tured products in British markets, a trafic that supplied
American farmers and artisans with most of the imple-
ments and tools used in agriculture and industry, enriched
American merchants, brought a steady stream of British
capital to these shores, and furnished nearly all the refine-
ments for the homes of the upper classes. ‘This commerce
the outbreak of the Revolution ruined—except for the smug-
gling and trading with the enemy that went on in spite
of the war—and the British blockade prevented the open-
ing of new channels sufficient to take its place.

Moreover, the armed struggle itself disrupted over wide
areas the ordinary processes of agriculture and industry
upon which the people relied for their living, put an intol-
erable drain upon the slender resources of the backwoods
civilization, destroyed by fire and pillage properties of im-
mense value, afforded the occasion for a serious confiscation
and transfer of estates, tore cities and communities asurider,
introduced varied and fluctuating currencies which made
the orderly transaction of business impossible, and delayed
the payments of debts while depreciating the medium for
discharging them. At the same time it proscribed and

POPULISM AND REACTION 299

drove from the country a large part of the governing class
—British executives, judges, merchants, capitalists, and
owners of property in general who remained loyal to the
Crown.

In many, if not all, respects, the immediate outcome of
the Revolution, radical as it was, displayed the deeper pur-
poses of the intransigent leaders who engineered it,
especially the dynamic personalities of the second social
rank nearest the fighting populace; for they wanted to rid
themselves entirely of British political, economic, and
judicial interference. When the conflict opened, the thir-
teen colonies were mere provinces’ of the British empire
under whose dominion they had been forbidden to emit
bills of credit, to make paper money legal tender in the
payment of debts, and to restrain foreign and intercolonial
commerce. Under British authority their industry and
trade had been regulated in the interest of British mer-
chants and manufacturers, subduing American agriculture
to the rules prescribed by the capitalist process in Londbn.
Under the same authority, control over the western lands
had been wrested from the grip of American pioneers and
politicians and vested in Crown officials. To make secure
the economic sovereignty, a highly centralized scheme of
judicial and administrative supremacy held the legislatures
of the colonies strictly within the bounds of business pro-
priety. In short, while the colonists had been gaining
strength in local government, their powers had been limited
and the higher functions of diplomacy, defence, and ultimate
social control had rested in British hands.

This was the system which the Revolutionists overthrew,
pulling down the elaborate superstructure and making the
local legislatures, in which farmers had the majorities,
supreme over all things. No Crown, no royal governor,
no board of trade in London, no superior judge could now
defeat the desires of agrarians. They had demanded au-
tonomy; they achieved independence.

Having rid themselves of a great, centralized political

300 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and economic machine, the radical leaders realized their
ideal in a loose association of sovereign states; in the Ar-
ticles of Confederation, their grand ideals were fairly
mirrored. The sole organ of government set up by that
instrument was a Congress composed of delegates from
each state, elected by the legislatures, and paid from the
state treasury, if paid at ali. Enjoying no independent and
inherent powers drawn directly from the people, this gov-
ernment was the creature of the states and the victim of the
factional disputes that filled the local theaters of politics.
It was in effect little more than a council of diplomatic
agents engaged in promoting thirteen separate interests,
without authority to interfere with the economic concerns
of any. In determining all vital questions, the states were
equal: each had one vote; Delaware was as powerful as Vir-
ginia, Rhode Island, the peer of Massachusetts.

As if to emphasize the repudiation of the British Crown,
no provision was made for a President to symbolize na-
tional unity, to concentrate interest and affection, indeed to
enforce the laws. It is true the Congress could select an
executive to represent the Confederation when it was not
in session but that executive was a committee of thirteen—
one member from each state—and when an attempt was
made to function through this agency, the result was not far
from the ludicrous.

In remembrance perhaps of British judicial control, now
broken by revolution, the framers of the Articles erected
no system of national courts to which the citizens could
appeal for the protection of their rights. ‘The structure of
the federal government, shaped as it was, managed by com-
mittees of the Congress functioning through independent
departments, worked for the diffusion of authority among
many men jealous of one another, subject to the orders and
recall of contending states, restrained by no leadership, and
endowed with no power to override the will of state legis-
Jatures, governors, and courts after the fashion of British
administration in provincial days.

POPULISM AND REACTION 301

The functions essential to any government of substance—
the powers which the colonists had resisted when exercised
by the British Crown and Parliament—were, naturally
enough, withheld from the Congress which the revolution-
ists created under the Articles of Confederation. As a
matter of course, the solemn duty of defending the country
was laid upon it: it could declare war, raise an army, and
provide a navy; but it could not draft a single soldier or
sailor; it could only ask the states to supply quotas of men
according to a system of apportionment. Even if the Con-
gress could have raised the men by this process, it could
never have been sure of the materials necessary to support
them.

It had power, no doubt, to appropriate money but no
authority to levy’upon the strong box or economic resources
of any citizen. For every penny that went into the common
treasury, it had to ask the local legislatures. When it
determined the amount of money needed for any fiscal
period or for any specific purpose, it apportioned the total
among the thirteen states on the basis of the value of the
lands and improvements in each, leaving the legislatures
free to decide how the quotas assigned were to be met—or
not met at all, according to the mood of the party in con-
trol at the time. In fact, therefore, the Congress had to
assume the role of a beggar, hat in hand, at the capitals of
the several commonwealths. In practice it experienced
what beggars usually do: more rebuffs than pleasant re-
ceptions.

If such was the weakness of the Confederation with re-
spect to those prime considerations, military power and
money, it is not strange to find the same incompetence in
other spheres. Conforming to colonial agrarian traditions,
the Congress was given no control over currency and bank-
ing, such as the government of Great Britain had exercised
in America before independence; on the contrary, these
vital economic functions were left to the discretion of the
individual states. Nor could the Congress regulate trade

302 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

among the states or with other countries; England had done
too much of that.

Although it could make treaties with foreign countries
affecting commercial matters, the Congress had no power
to enforce its agreements against the will of recalcitrant
states—in fact, no control over the latter in any imporant
respect. Almost entirely dependent upon them for the en-
forcement of its laws and orders, it could not exact obedi-
ence from them, punish them by pecuniary penalties, sus-
pend their privileges, or use military force against them.
Neither could it intervene in the domestic affairs of a state
even if a civil war threatened the overthrow of local gov-
ernment and the dissolution of economic bonds.

To put the case concisely, the states were, for domestic
purposes, sovereign, while the Congress presented the ‘‘ex-
traordinary spectacle of a government destitute of even a
shadow of a constitutional power to enforce the execution
of its own laws.’”’ The radical leaders of the Revolution
had not thrown off British agencies of economic coercion
for the mere purpose of substituting another centralized
system of legislative, executive, and judicial control.

§

To the eight years of government under these Articles
of Confederation, the term “‘critical period” has been ap-
plied and it has become the fashion to draw a doleful pic-
ture of the age, to portray the country sweeping toward
an abyss from which it was rescued in the nick of time by
the heroic framers of the Constitution. Yet an analysis of
the data upon which that view is built raises the specter
of skepticism. The chief sources of information bearing
on this thesis are the assertions and lamentations of but one
faction in the great dispute and they must, therefore, be
approached with the same spirit of prudence as Whig edi-
torials on Andrew Jackson or Republican essays on Wood-
row Wilson.

POPULISM AND REACTION 303

Undoubtedly the period that followed the close of the
Revolutionary War was one of dissolution and reconstruc-
tion; that is the story of every great social dislocation.
Still there is much evidence to show that the country was
in many respects steadily recovering order and prosperity
even under the despised Articles of Confederation. If
seven of the thirteen states made hazardous experiments
with paper money, six clung to more practical methods and
two or three of those that had embarked on unlimited in-
flation showed signs of turning back on their course.
While a few states displayed a heartless negligence in pay-
ing their revolutionary debts, others gave serious attention
to the matter. Though the efforts of the Congress to
secure larger powers over taxation and commerce were de-
feated, an agreement on some control over foreign trade
was almost in sight when the constitutional convention was
summoned by men impatient with delay. ‘The very fact
that the convention could be assembled was in itself evi-
dence of a changing spirit in the country.

On the whole, the economic condition of the country
seemed to be improving. No doubt shipping in New Eng-
land and manufacturing in general suffered from the con-
flicting tariff policies, domestic and foreign, which followed
the war, but, at the opening of 1787, Benjamin Franklin de-
clared that the prosperity of the nation was so great as to
call for thanksgiving. According to his judgment, the mar-
ket reports then showed that the farmers were never better
paid for their produce, that farm lands were continually
rising in value, and that in no part of Europe were the
laboring poor in such a fortunate state. Admitting that
there were economic grievances in some quarters, Franklin
expressed a conviction that the country at large was in a
sound condition.

Nearly a hundred years after Franklin’s time a learned,
if controversial, historian, Henry B. Dawson, on the basis
of minute researches, made out a very good argument to
the effect that the ‘‘chaos” of the “critical period’? was

304 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

largely a figment of political imagination. Whatever the
verdict on this point may be, the difficulty with which the
Constitution was “wrung” from a reluctant people and the
existence of a large body of voters aggressively opposed
to the change will put the prudent inquirer on his guard
against the easy assumption that the entire country was
seized with a poignant sense of impending calamity.

Nevertheless, when the best possible case is made for the
critical period, there remain standing in the record of those
years certain impressive facts that cannot be denied or
explained away. Beyond all question the financiers had
grounds for complaint. Though the principal of the con-
tinental debt was slightly reduced under the confederation,
the arrears of interest increased nearly fourfold and the
unpaid interest on the foreign obligations piled steadily
higher. In an equally chaotic condition were the current
finances. [he Congress in due course made requisitions
on the states to pay its bills, but it was fortunate if it
received in any year one-fourth of the amount de-
manded, and during the last fourteen months of its life
less than half a million in paper money was paid into the
treasury—not enough to meet the interest on the foreign
debt alone.

Hence all who held claims against the confederacy had
sufficient cause for discontent. Holders of government
bonds, both original subscribers who had made sacrifices
and speculators who had bought up depreciated paper by
the ream, had good reasons for desiring a change in the
existing form of government. To them were added the
soldiers of the late revolutionary army, especially the ofh-
cers whose bonus of full pay for five years still remained
in the form of paper promises.

Industry and commerce as well as government finances
were in a state of depression. When peace came and the
pent-up flood of British goods burst in upon the local mar-
ket, greatly to the joy of the farmers and planters, Amer-
ican manufacturers, who had built up enterprises of no

POPULISM AND REACTION 305

little importance during the suspension of British trade,
found their monopoly of domestic business rudely broken.
Nothing but a protective tariff, they thought, could save
them from ruin. In the same category of the distressed
were American shipowners and factors engaged in foreign
trade, especially the ubiquitous Yankees who now suffered
from discriminations as aliens in the ports of the British
empire. In spite of heroic efforts they could not effect a
return to prosperity; nor was there any sign of relief in
sight as long as the Congress under the Articles of Confed-
eration possessed no power to enact retaliatory measures
calculated to bring foreign countries to terms.

In an equally unhappy position were the domestic mer-
chants. They had at hand no national currency uniform in
value through the length and breadth of the land—nothing
but a curious collection of coins uncertain in weight, shaven
by clippers, debased by counterfeiters, and paper notes
fluctuating as new issues streamed from the press. Worse
than the monetary system were the impediments in the
way of interstate commerce. Under local influences
legislatures put tarifis on goods coming in from neighbor-
ing states just as on foreign imports, waged commercial
wars of retaliation on one another, raised and lowered rates
as factional disputes oscillated, reaching such a point in
New York that duties were levied on firewood from Con-
necticut and cabbages from New Jersey.

If a merchant surmounted the obstacles placed in his
way by anarchy in the currency and confusion in tariff
schedules and succeeded in building up an interstate busi-
ness, he never could be sure of collections, for he was
always at the mercy of local courts and juries—agencies
that were seldom tender in dealing with the claims and
rights of distant creditors as against the clamors of their
immediate neighbors. While the Articles of Confederation
lasted there was no hope of breaching such invincible
barriers to the smooth and easy transaction of interstate
business.

306 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Other economic groups likewise had powerful motives
for desiring a change in the form of government. Money
lenders who held outstanding notes and mortgages objected
to receiving in payment paper bills emitted by the treasuries
of the agrarian states and demanded a limitation on their
right to issue such legal tenders. In a plight no less dis-
tressing were the British creditors and Americans to whom
British claims had been transferred. Checked by the hos-
tility of state legislatures and local courts, they were usually
unable to collect debts solemnly recognized by the treaty
of peace and they could hope for no adequate settlement,
especially in the South, while the confederation endured.
Loyalists who had lost property during the Revolution suf-
fered similar handicaps in the presence of local judges and
jurors. Finally, the officers and soldiers, who held land
warrants issued to them in return for their war services,
and capitalists engaged in western land speculation could
count on no realization of their claims until there was a
national army strong enough to suppress the hostile Indians
on the frontier.

In short, the financial, creditor, commercial, and specu-
lating classes in the new confederate republic were harassed
during the critical period just as such classes had been
harassed by rebellious patriots on the eve of the Revolu-
tion. From every point of view, as they saw the matter,
they had valid reasons for wanting to establish under their
own auspices on American soil a system of centralized po-
litical, judicial, and economic control similar in character
to that formerly exercised by Great Britain. They wanted
debts paid, a sound currency established, commerce regu-
lated, paper money struck down, and western lands prop-
erly distributed; they desired these things quite as much
as the governing classes of England had desired them in
colonial times. No more than the stoutest Tory of London
or Boston did they relish agrarian politics; commerce
simply could not thrive in that economic atmosphere.
Those who sponsored business enterprise accordingly de-

POPULISM AND REACTION 307

manded new central organs of power and control and fresh
restraints on the leveling tendencies of local legislatures
generally dominated by farmers.

If they objected to the national system of government,
they could with equal sanction protest against the adminis-
tration of the respective states. Indeed, Massachusetts
gave them a shock which presaged a swing to the extreme
revolutionary left. In that commonwealth a conservative
party of merchants, shippers, and money lenders had man-
aged by a hard won battle to secure in 1780 a local consti-
tution which gave their property special defenses in the
suffrage, in the composition of the Senate, and in the quali-
fications of office holders administering the law. Heavy
taxes were then levied to pay the revolutionary debt of the
state, a large part of which had passed into the hands of
speculators. And just when this burden fell on the people,
private creditors in their haste to collect outstanding ac-
counts deluged the local courts with lawsuits and fore-
closures of farm mortgages.

The answer to this economic pressure was a populist
movement led by a former soldier of the Revolution,
Daniel Shays. Inflamed by new revolutionary appeals, re-
surgent agrarians now proposed to scale down the state
debt, strike from the constitution the special privileges
enjoyed by property, issue paper money, and generally ease
the position of debtors and the laboring poor in town and
country. Indeed, there were dark hints that the soldiers
who had fought for independence would insist that prop-
erty owners must sacrifice their goods for the cause. In
various guises the agitation continued until in 1786 it culmi-
nated in an armed uprising known as Shays’ Rebellion.

Although the insurrection was crushed, it sent alarms
throughout the higher social orders of America. If Jeffer-
son was unmoved because he thought that a little bloodshed
was occasionally necessary to keep alive the spirit of
agrarian liberty, Washington was thoroughly frightened.
On hearing the news, he redoubled his efforts to obtain a

308 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

stronger constitution—one that would afford national aid
in suppressing such local disturbances. There was even talk
of a counter-revolution, a military dictatorship supported by
funds from merchants.

In foreign relations there were perils as menacing as the
difficulties of domestic administration. With respect to
Great Britain, many perplexing questions arising out of
the treaty of peace remained unsolved and new adjustments
of commercial relations had to be made. And not unnatu-
rally the mother country was somewhat ungracious to her
wayward child in all such matters. When John Adams,
as minister of the United States, appeared at the Court of
the King he met a frosty reception, made several degrees
chillier by constant reminders that the government he rep-
resented was really impotent. If he hinted that British sol-
diers should be withdrawn from the western part of the
United States or that the ports of the British West Indies
should be opened once more to American ships on favorable
terms, he was reminded that his fellow countrymen had not
paid the debts due British merchants and he was shown
acts of Parliament which, not without reason, treated
Americans as aliens.

Nearer home, foreign relations presented hate call-
ing for more judgment and power in solution than the
Congress of the United States showed any inclination to
provide. Though nominally isolated in the New World,
the confederacy was bounded on the landward side by
immense territories belonging to England and Spain, both
countries that had been contending for mastery in America
for two hundred years. At any moment a new storm might
break, involving the weak republic at the very threshold
of its career. Even the most case-hardened agrarians could
not avoid seeing the possibility of renewed strife among the
European powers—which came in 1793—the dangers of
foreign intervention in domestic politics, and the perils of
disruptive rivalry among the states. If they were indif-
ferent to the demands of public creditors, financiers, and

POPULISM AND REACTION 309

merchants clamoring for relief, they could not ignore the
menaces from foreign quarters.

§

Such were the circumstances in which rose and flourished
a movement for a drastic revision of the Articles of Con-
federation. In recognition of the gathering forces, the
Congress appealed again and again to the states, asking
them to approve an amendment giving it the power to lay
and collect certain import duties for the purpose of meet-
ing public obligations. But all such appeals were futile:
the approval of every state was necessary to the slightest
change and there was always at least one of them unwilling
to surrender that ‘“‘precious jewel of sovereignty,” control
over its purse.

Finding the efforts of the Congress without avail, lead-
ing citizens then called for an economic and political revolu-
tion. Indeed, in 1780—even before the adoption of the
Articles of Confederation—Alexander WHamilton, im-
pressed by shortcomings of the document, had proposed
that a constitutional convention be assembled and a better
charter of government framed. ‘Three years afterward,
Washington, in his famous Circular Letter to the governors
of the states, laid stress upon the need for a supreme cen-
tral power to regulate the general concerns of the confed-
eration. Already disturbed by the rumblings soon to break
out in Shays’ Rebellion, the governor of Massachusetts

had suggested and the legislature had resolved, in 1785,
that the Articles of Confederation be reformed, especially
by increasing the powers of the Congress.

The early response to this agitation for a constitutional
revision was not impressive. When Virginia turned from
rhetoric to action by inviting the states to send delegates
to a convention at Annapolis in 1786, only five of the thir-
teen complied. Had it not been for the consummate skill
of Hamilton, the conference would have closed in gloom;

310 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

determined never to confess defeat, he induced the Annap-
olis assembly to pass a resolution advising the states to
choose delegates to a second convention to be held in
Philadelphia the following year. ‘Taking into full account
the well-known opposition to any such project, Hamilton
worded his resolution with utmost caution. In form he
merely recommended a “‘revision” of the Articles in order
to render them “‘adequate to the exigencies of the union,”’
and he allayed the suspicions of the local legislatures by
adding that any amendments made at Philadelphia should
be submitted to the states for their ratification as provided
in the Articles.

In due course the proposal of the Annapolis conference
was sent both to the state legislatures and to the Congress
and in February, 1787, the latter issued a call for the Phila-
delphia assembly. Exercising Hamiltonian circumspection,
it phrased its resolution carefully: the convention was to be
held for the sole and express purpose of revising the Ar-
ticles; proposed amendments were to be submitted to the
Congress and to the states for approval; the letter and the
spirit of the Articles were to be observed. With an alacrity
that must have amazed the leaders in the revisionist move-
ment, all the states, except Rhode Island, acting through
their legislatures, now chose delegates as requested—some
even anticipating the call. Most of them, however, taking
Hamilton’s moderation at face value, expressly limited
their delegates to a revision of the Articles, saving in all
respects the prescribed formalities of the existing consti-
tution. |

Among the many historic assemblies which have wrought
revolutions in the affairs of mankind, it seems safe to say
that there has never been one that commanded more politi-
cal talent, practical experience, and sound substance than
the Philadelphia convention of 1787. In all, sixty-two dele-
gates were formally appointed by the states; fifty-five at-
tended the sessions with more or less regularity; and thirty-
nine signed the final draft of the new Constitution. On the

POPULISM AND REACTION sie

list were men trained in war and diplomacy, skilled in
legislation and administration, versed in finance and com-
merce, and learned in the political philosophy of their own
and earlier times. Seven had been governors of states
and at least twenty-eight had served in the Congress of the
union either during the Revolution or under the Articles
of Confederation. Eight had been signers of the Declara-
tion of Independence. At the head stood Washington,
who, with one voice, was chosen president of the conven-
tion. Among those who sat under him were such men as
the two Morrises, the two Pinckneys, Madison, Hamilton,
Franklin, Rutledge, Gerry, Ellsworth, Wilson, Randolph,
Wythe, Dickinson, and Sherman, nearly all of whom repre-
sented the conservative wing of the old revolutionary party.

At all events none of the fiery radicals of 1774 was
present. Jefferson, then serving as the American minister
in Paris, was out of the country; Patrick Henry was elected
but refused to attend because, he said, he ‘“‘smellt a rat’’;
Samuel Adams was not chosen; Thomas Paine left for
Europe that very year to exhibit an iron bridge which he
had designed and to wage war on tyranny across the sea.
So the Philadelphia assembly, instead of being composed of
left-wing theorists, was made up of practical men of af-
fairs—holders of state and continental bonds, money lend-
ers, merchants, lawyers, and speculators in the public
Jand—who could speak with knowledge and feeling about
the disabilities they had suffered under the Articles of Con-
federation. More than half the delegates in attendance
were either investors or speculators in the public securities
which were to be buoyed up by the new Constitution. All
knew by experience the relation of property to government.

When the convention assembled late in May, 1787, there
arose at once the question whether the proceedings should
be thrown open to the general public or be held behind
closed doors. The body was small, oratory was evidently
out of place, and none of the members was especially
eager to appeal to the gallery. As realistic statesmen,

312 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

they knew that negotiation and accommodation would be
more effective in the attainment of their ends than Cice-
ronian eloquence and tattered passion. It was well under-
stood that the dissensions bound to arise in the convention
would be magnified if irresponsible partisans on the outside
learned about them and continually prodded the delegates
with popular agitations. It was also known how sharply
the country at large was divided over the problems to be
solved and how easily timid members might be frightened
into voting against their own judgment by the demands of
excited constituents.

So, without much argument, the members resolved that
the proceedings of the convention should be secret and no
One permitted to give out in any form any information re-
specting its deliberations. In harmony with this decision
they likewise agreed that no official record of the debates
should be kept, that nothing should be set down in black
and white save a bare minute of the propositions before
the house and the votes cast for and against them. In
their anxiety for security the delegates took every precau-
tion against publicity; they even had a discreet colleague
accompany the aged Franklin to his convivial dinners with
a view to checking that amiable gentleman whenever, in
unguarded moments, he threatened to divulge secrets of
state.

If a few members, particularly James Madison, had not
made notes of the speeches delivered in the convention,
posterity would never have discovered the real spirit that
animated the discussions. And it was not until more than
half a century later—after Madison, the last surviving
member, had died and his private papers were published—
that Americans got a clear insight into the proceedings of
the great assembly that had drafted their revered Con-
stitution.

Having settled the question of secret sessions, the mem-
bers of the convention came face to face with a fundamental
issue: should they adhere to the letter of their instructions

POPULISM AND REACTION 313

by merely amending the Articles of Confederation or
should they make a revolution in the whole political régime
by drafting a new constitution founded on entirely different
principles? ‘The point was a nice one. The Congress
which had called them together and the states that had
selected them had simply authorized them to propose
amendments to the existing constitutional instrument.
Nevertheless such amendments, according to the same in-
structions, were to make the existing Articles “adequate to
the exigencies of government and the preservation of the
union.”

With good reason an agile mind could take either
horn of the dilemma. Paterson of New Jersey, speaking
for the small states in danger of losing their equal and
swollen authority, argued that “if the confederacy is radi-
cally wrong, let us return to our states and obtain larger
powers, not assume them ourselves.” Randolph of Vir-
ginia retorted that he was not ‘‘scrupulous on the point
of power.” Hamilton agreed; to propose any plan not
adequate to the exigencies of union because it was not
clearly within their instructions, he thought, would be to
sacrifice the end to the means.

Having come to accomplish results rather than to chop
logic, the majority of the members accepted the liberal
view of the matter and refused to be bound by the letter
of the existing law. They did not amend the Articles of
Confederation; they cast that instrument aside and drafted
a fresh plan of government. Nor did they merely send
the new document to the Congress and then to the state
legislatures for approval; on the contrary they appealed
over the heads of these authorities to the voters of the
states for a ratification of their revolutionary work.
Finally, declining to obey the clause of the Articles which
required unanimous approval for every amendment, they
frankly proposed that the new system of government
should go into effect when sanctioned by nine of the thir-
teen states, leaving the others out in the cold under the

314 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

wreck of the existing legal order, in case they refused to
ratify.
§

For more than a hundred years it was the custom of
historians, in speaking of the work of the delegates, to
emphasize their differences of opinion, their impassioned
controversies, and their compromises, whereas as a matter
of fact they exhibited a striking unanimity of opinion on
the great economic objects which they had assembled to
attain. For this we have the testimony of a competent
modern scholar, R. L. Schuyler, who has put the whole story
of the making of the Constitution in a new perspective by
showing, on the basis of authentic researches, that the essen-
tial agreements of the Philadelphia convention were more
significant than its disputes.

In the light of his inquiries, it appears that a safe ma-
jority of the members was early mustered on nearly all the
fundamental issues before them. If they warmly debated
many matters pertaining to means and instrumentalities,
they agreed with relative ease that a national government
must be erected and endowed with ample power to defend
the country on land and sea, to pay the national debt, to
protect private property against agrarian legislatures, to
secure the return of fugitive servants, and to uphold the
public order against domestic insurrection. This basic
fact should not be obscured in any consideration of the long
and tempestuous arguments that arose over the form of
the new government and the representation of the states
In it.

On the creation of a great national agency endowed with
political power equal to specific tasks of the highest order
there was so much solidarity of opinion that the objections
of the insurgent few merely emphasized the general con-
cord. A few days after they had formally organized,
namely, on May 30, the delegates solemnly adopted in the
committee of the whole a momentous resolution “that a

POPULISM AND REACTION 315

national government ought to be established consisting of
a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary.” It is true
that the vote on this proposition was only six states in
favor to one against and one divided and that the alarm-
ing word ‘‘national’”’ was later struck out, but the debates
that accompanied and followed this action clearly indicated
the temper of the convention. In commenting on the dis-
tinction between a confederacy and a national supreme goy-
ernment, Gouverneur Morris made it evident that the for-
mer was ‘“‘a mere compact resting on the good faith of the
parties,” while the latter had a complete and compulsive
operation. Other members spoke in the same vein; so
there could be no doubt as to what was in the minds of the
majority; they were determined to establish an efficient na-
tional government. One of the protestants, Luther Mar-
tin, of Maryland, who later withdrew from the convention
in anger, blurted out the plain truth when he said that it
was the purpose of the Philadelphia assembly to set up ‘‘a
national, not a federal government.’ If somewhat vehe-
ment, Martin was remarkably accurate in his judgment.

With reference to other issues of paramount significance
there was even more unanimity. It required no heroic
measures to bring about an agreement that Congress should
have the power to lay and collect taxes, regulate foreign
and interstate commerce, and do all things necessary and
proper to carry into effect its enumerated functions. No
member was in favor of repudiating or sharply scaling down
the national debt; the clause sustaining the validity of all
outstanding obligations and contracts was carried with but
one discordant voice.

Equally general was the conviction that the states should
not be allowed to issue bills of credit or impair the obliga-
tions of contracts. Almost unanimous was the opinion that
democracy was a dangerous thing, to be restrained, not en-
couraged, by the Constitution, to be given as little voice as
possible in the new system, to be hampered by checks and
balances. Gerry declared that the evils the country had

316 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

experienced flowed from “the excess of democracy.” Ran-
dolph traced the troubles of the past few years to “the
turbulence and follies of democracy.” Arguing in favor
of a life term for Senators, Hamilton exclaimed that ‘“‘all
communities divide themselves into the few and the many.
The first are rich and well-born and the other the mass
of the people who seldom judge or determine right.” Mor-
ris wanted a Senate composed of an aristocracy of wealth
to “keep down the turbulence of democracy.’’ Madison,
discoursing on the perils of majority rule, stated that their
object was “‘to secure the public good and private rights
against the danger of such a faction and at the same time
preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”

§

It was with reference to the form of government capable
of attaining their grand objects and the respective weight
to be assigned to the leading interests of the country in the
balanced machine that the most acute diversity of opinion
developed. In that relation the records disclose a strange
story. They do not portray a group of inspired individuals
convinced in advance that only one project of government
could accomplish the general purposes they had clearly in
mind. Instead of a disciplined crew under a stern and
bright-eyed captain steering the ship of state by the north
star, we see a wrangling body of thoughtful, experienced,
and capable men, but harassed men, torn by interests, preju-
dices, and passions, drifting one day in one direction and
the next in another, deciding long debated issues, opening
them again, altering their previous views, and adopting
novel solutions.

It is certainly a startling lesson in the fallibility of states-
men to compare the authentic plans laid before the conven-
tion in the opening days with the finished Constitution pub-
lished at the close. For example, the Virginia scheme pre-
sented by Randolph provided for a congress of two houses

POPULISM AND REACTION S14

composed of members apportioned among the states on the
basis of wealth or free white population; this congress was
to elect the executive—either a single person or a group
of men; and to exercise general legislative powers, including
that of annulling state laws contrary to the Constitution.
The curious cannot help but wonder what would have been
the fate of the American union if that plan had been
adopted. But such speculation is idle. Randolph’s plan
had hardly been read when it was condemned by Paterson
of New Jersey in the name of the small states calling for a
legislature of a single house in which commonwealths, not
people, were to be represented and all states given an equal
vote. Neither plan was adopted.

In its final form the Constitution, so far as the struc-
ture of the government was concerned, was ‘“‘a bundle of
compromises.”’ It was more. It was a mosaic of second
choices accepted in the interest of union and the substantial
benefits to flow from union.

One of the compromises, fundamental in character, occu-
pies a high place in treatises on the Constitution; that was
the adjustment between large and small states. The for-
mer, weary of domination by minorities, demanded, as we
have just indicated, a congress based on populations instead
of political entities. The latter, tenacious in the defense
of their interests, insisted with the same emphasis on
equality among the commonwealths in the national legisla-
ture. And through many exciting sessions the debate over
this issue ran on fiercely.

More than once dissolution seemed imminent, the dele-
gates being held together, as one of them remarked, only
‘‘by the strength of a hair.’ Frightened by the spectacle,
Franklin, in despair of human devices, proposed that the
convention be opened daily with prayer, invoking divine
guidance to save it from ruin. Even on this motion, agree-
ment was impossible. “he hard-headed Hamilton, accord-
ing to tradition, thought that they were not in need of
‘foreign aid;’>y and: »his:, colleagues ‘objected*on: other

318 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

grounds, fearing that news of a change in procedure might
leak out and give the impression that the convention had
come to the end of its earthly resources. Eventually, by
the use of extreme tact, they managed to weather the storm
without resorting to prayer and to avert the crisis through
negotiations and a happy compromise. In the end they
agreed upon a national legislature of two houses: in the
Senate, with greater powers and dignity, the aspirations of
the states were to be satisfied by equal representation; while
in the House of Representatives, the interests of the larger
states were to be conserved by the apportionment of mem:
bers among them on the basis of population, counting three-
fifths of the slaves.

No less fundamental than the dispute over the political
power to be enjoyed by the large and small states was one
which deeply involved the economic interests of sections.
Indeed, after listening carefully to the debates for several
weeks, Madison noted that the real division in the conven-
tion was between the planting interests of the South
founded on slave labor and the commercial and industrial
interests of the North—startling foresight discerning
“the irrepressible conflict” which filled half a century with
political controversy and tested the Constitution in the
flames of a social revolution.

In all there were only six planting states, counting little
Delaware, and they had neither wealth nor population com-
parable to the resources of the seven commercial states.
Climate, soil, tradition, and labor supply seemed destined
to make them producers of foodstuffs and raw materials
to be exchanged in favorable markets for manufactured
goods. ‘Therefore, it was their prime concern to ship at
the lowest possible freight rates in vessels sailing under any
flag and to buy and sell on the most advantageous terms
anywhere on earth. Weaker in number, they feared that
the proposed Congress, dominated by a mere numerical
majority, might lay an undue burden of customs duties and
taxes upon them—the shifting of taxes being one of the

POPULISM AND REACTION 319

grand devices of politics for the transfer of wealth from
one class to another. ‘They were also afraid that Con-
gress, under capitalistic influences, would enact tariff legis-
lation and navigation laws injurious to their enterprise.

On the other hand, the trading and industrial interests
of the North, languishing under free trade, under financial
disorders, and under English discriminations, saw their
only hope for prosperity in protective tariffs and favorable
commercial legislation. The issue was definite and familiar.
It had been made clear in the contest with Great Britain
when Parliament sought to restrain colonial legislatures
and colonial trade with reference to the profits of British
merchants, shippers, and manufacturers. It was to cut
athwart the history of centuries to come.

Disputes arising from this inherent conflict of interests
ran throughout the proceedings of the convention even
when questions apparently remote from the main issue were
on the carpet. Especially were they animated on matters
of representation and taxation, those sore points in the
revolutionary struggle. Anxious to secure a strategic po-
sition in the new government through the largest possible
strength in the lower house, Southern planters proposed to
count slaves as people in distributing Representatives on
the population basis. At the same time, aware that their
states had fewer inhabitants than the commercial common-
wealths of the North, the planters urged that direct taxes be
apportioned only on the basis of the free white population.
For equally obvious reasons most of the Northern delegates
wanted just the opposite of these two propositions. So
on this issue a compromise was the last resort. Adopting
a well-known expedient the convention agreed on treating
three-fifths of the slaves as people for both reckonings,
representation and direct taxation.

In framing the provisions relative to the regulation of
commerce, the same clash of opinion appeared. If the new
government was to have the power to control trade and
make treaties with foreign nations, it might prohibit the

320 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

importation of slaves and enter into commercial agree-
ments detrimental to the planting interest. Here also an
accommodation was evidently imperative and it took the
form of two provisions: the importation of slaves was not
to be forbidden before the lapse of twenty years and a two-
thirds vote in the Senate was to be required for the ratifica-
tion of treaties. An additional concession was made to the
South in the clause providing for the return of fugitives
bound to servitude—all the more readily because this was
highly useful in the North where the restoration of run-
away servants was also acceptable to masters.

During the arguments that sprang from the clash of
economic interests, the ethics of slavery itself was broached
though at no time did it rise to the position of a leading
issue. Taking advantage of the occasion several members
of the convention denounced chattel bondage in uncompro-
mising language. Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania,
condemned it as a nefarious institution and a curse to the
states in which it prevailed. Mason, of Virginia, a slave-
holder himself, seeing nothing but evil in it, declared that
it discouraged the arts and industry, led the poor to despise
honest labor, and checked the immigration of whites whose
work gave strength and riches to the land.

The voice of defense, raised in reply, came from the Far
South. Spokesmen from South Carolina insisted that the
whole economic life of their state rested on slavery and
that, owing to the appalling death rate in the rice swamps,
continuous importation was necessary. With cold optimism
Oliver Ellsworth, of Connecticut, advised moderation.
“The morality or wisdom of slavery,” he said, “are con-
- siderations belonging to the states. What enriches a part
enriches the whole. . . . As population increases, poor
laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.”

Technically, Ellsworth was right, for slavery as an insti-
tution was not before the convention but some decision had
to be made with respect to the importation of Negroes. On
this point, too, conciliation was found expedient. Virginia

POPULISM AND REACTION sol

and North Carolina, already overstocked, were prepared
to end the traffic in African slaves but South Carolina was
adamant. She must have new supplies by importation or
she would not federate; hence the clause postponing action
at least until 1808. These were the great compromises of
the Constitution.

§

By reason of their infinite capacity for practical adjust-
ments and their deep determination to accomplish their
fundamental purposes, the members of the convention
finally managed to agree upon a great political project. In
its form the government which they thus created gave
promise of strength and stability. “The completed Consti-
tution provided for a single executive chosen indirectly—by
electors in their turn selected as the state legislatures might
decide—a President of the United States serving for four
years (subject to impeachment) and endowed with regal
powers in the enforcement of laws and the use of armed
might. The possibility of dictatorship in times of stress
was foreseen and the issue squarely met. As Hamilton
afterward reminded his fellow citizens, often in Roman his-
tory it had been necessary to resort to absolute power
against social disturbances at home and invasions from
abroad. When Lincoln, half a century later, crushed seces-
sion by military force, he did but fulfill the prophecy of the
Fathers.

Yet in contemplating this outcome, it is interesting to
recall that the presidential system was the product of no
little guesswork in the convention. The Virginia plan
proposed an executive department chosen by a congress
but did not specify whether it should be composed of one or
many persons. The New Jersey plan, which likewise sug-
gested congressional election, called for a council instead
of a single head.

On the various points involved, the convention voted
first one way and then another, arriving at the final result

322 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

as much by accident as by intent. If either the Virginia or
the New Jersey scheme had been adopted, parliamentary
government would have developed in America and modern
publicists would have displayed their enthusiasm and talents
in demonstrating the merits of that particular system.
Would the history of American politics have been essen-
tially different?

The same consideration for stability and strength
marked the adoption of the clauses relative to the legisla-
ture. Instead of a single council of ambassadors—for such
in effect had been the Congress under the Articles of Con-
federation—paid by the states and subject to their de-
cisions, the Constitution created an independent bicameral
system. If there was a reminder of the old order in the
clauses which gave each state two members in the Senate,

to be elected by its legislature, the position accorded to
the Senators was essentially original. ‘They could vote as
individuals, they could not be recalled or bound by instruc-

tions, they enjoyed a fixed term of six years, they were to
look to the national treasury for compensation.

At the side of the Senate was placed an entirely new
body, the House of Representatives, apportioned among
the states mainly on the basis of population, elected by
popular vote and, like the Senators, paid from the national
treasury. In this way, it was believed, the power of any
faction or party that dominated a state could be divided
at its source and thereby the force of majority rule broken.
As Madison pointed out, the mechanism was based on the
idea that in actual politics men have to deal with effective
powers, not with a mythical entity known as “indivisible
sovereignty.” 7

With the idea of creating a central control analogous
to that formerly exercised by British courts, a judicial as
well as an executive department was added to the govern-
ment by the Constitution. Under the Articles of Con-
federation, the state courts had been practically independ-
ent of all supervision from above and the Congress had

POPULISM AND REACTION Bzo

been almost wholly dependent on those frail reeds for any
enforcement of laws or treaties which called for judicial
process.

A product of the Revolution, that arrangement was no
accident, for one of the prime objects of many partici-
pants in the uprising had been to break the grip of British
agencies on agrarian legislatures and tribunals. Now that
the struggle was over, citizens who did not want to pay
their debts to British merchants or restore Tory property
had additional reasons for clinging to emancipation. But
men of affairs, national in their business vision, in their in-
vestments, and in their commercial undertakings, took a
different view of local judges and jurors.

From any angle, the question was vexatious and had to
be handled adroitly by the convention. It was, as Gouver-
neur Morris said, only by the exercise of extreme caution
that the committee in charge of the matter was able to
draw up an acceptable clause and reach an agreement on
the creation of the Supreme Court and “such other courts”
as Congress might authorize, high tribunals endowed with
jurisdiction over all cases in law and equity arising under
the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties.

In these circumstances much was left to the future, to
Providence, as Lamartine once remarked on a similar occa-
sion. It was not expressly stated, for instance, that the
federal courts should enjoy the power of declaring acts of
Congress null and void on constitutional grounds but the
idea that the federal judiciary would use this high preroga-
tive was fully appreciated by adepts in jurisprudence at the
time. Measures passed by colonial legislatures had been
repeatedly nullified by British courts and a few precedents
had been set by American judges during the critical period.
Of course, in popular circles the theory and the practice
were fiercely attacked but, on the other hand, they were
vigorously defended in the Philadelphia convention and
outside it by lawyers accustomed to the business of high
judicature. Beyond all question veterans admitted to the

324 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

more esoteric groups of the legal guild understood the issue
even if some farmers along the Allegheny ridge failed to
grasp its import.

§

The functions of the new government, no less than its
structure, presented striking innovations. Authority was
conferred upon the President sufficient, as noted, to clothe
with legality, should occasion arise, even the exercise of
Cesar’s prerogatives. [The supremacy of the judiciary, im-
plicit if not expressed, only needed the magic of John Mar-
shall to make it a part of a sacred tradition illuminating
the written word. With regard to legislative duties, Con-
gress in its turn received express and general powers ade-
quate to the economic requirements of the classes adversely
affected under the Articles.

First of all—recalling the old attempts of Parliament
to levy taxes without the consent of provincial assemblies—
the necessity of depending upon the state legislatures for
federal revenues was entirely eliminated. Congress was
authorized to collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises di-
rectly from the people as individuals—by a broad and
sweeping clause under which wonders could be worked in
the protection, as well as the taxation, of business enter-
prise. While the prospect of abundant revenues collected
with discrimination gave cheer to possessors of depreciated
government securities and held out hope to languishing in-
dustries, another clause promised succor to those engaged
in the arts of trade.

Having clearly in mind foreign discriminations and the
commercial anarchy that existed among the states, the
framers of the Constitution provided that Congress should
have power to regulate foreign and interstate commerce,
thus wiping out state tariff lines and creating a national
market area behind a federal wall. Moreover, the Amer-
ican estate was to be guarded by effective military de-
fense: Congress was to depend no longer on the good graces

POPULISM AND REACTION — 320

of the states for soldiers and sailors; it was given unlimited
authority to raise and maintain armed forces for land and
sea, besides the privilege of utilizing the state militia in
emergencies. Finally the enumerated powers were crowned
by a blanket provision in which Congress was given a
general mandate to make all laws necessary and proper for
carrying into effect the authority expressly conferred.
Under the light shed by the expansive imagination of Chief
Justice Marshall that clause became a Pandora’s box of
wonders.
§

While agreeing that these large powers had to be given
to the new government, the framers of the Constitution
shrank from the very giant they had created. Madison
foresaw a time, not far distant, when the great mass of
the people would be without landed or any other kind of
property, when in spite of all precautions a triumphant
majority might get possession of the political machine and
make it an engine of their purposes to the detriment of
the public good, that is, in the main to the detriment of
private property.

Frightened by this specter of democracy, some of the
members of the convention proposed to restrain the masses
by putting property qualifications on the suffrage and on
high federal officers. Though the suggestion was warmly
received a number of capital obstacles were pointed out in
the course of the debate. If each voter or officer was
required to possess a large amount of personal property,
such as stocks and bonds, then the existing voters, two-
thirds of whom were farmers, would not ratify an instru-
ment that disfranchised them. A landed qualification was,
therefore, the only alternative but bitter experience had
showed that it was the farmers who sent radicals to the
state legislatures and waged the war on money lenders,
merchants, and other holders of personal property. After
tossing about restlessly for several days, the delegates gave

326 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

up the idea of entrenching property in the Constitution by
specific restrictions on voting and office holding.

Finding that course barred, the delegates chose another
way of dissolving the energy of the democratic majority.
They broke its strength at the source by providing diverse
methods for electing the agencies of the new government
and threw special barriers in its path by setting those agen-
cies, with their several ambitions, prerogatives, and insig-
nia, at cross purposes. In short, the Fathers created a
system of “‘checks and balances,” dividing the power of
government among legislative, executive, and judicial
branches with confused and uncertain boundaries. All the
world has marveled at their dexterity.

The legislature as they devised it was of intricate struc-
ture. Members of the House of Representatives were to
be distributed among the states roughly on the basis of
population and they were to be elected biennially by those
voters authorized by the respective states to take part in
the choice of members for the lower house of the local
legislature. That, as Hamilton remarked, gave the poorer
orders of men a hearing in the government. But the
chamber so directly affliated with the commonalty was by
no means to have a clear track in the making of laws. A
strong Senate was thrown across its way. Senators were
to be chosen by the state legislatures, one degree removed
from the multitude; they were to serve for six years instead
of two; and only one-third of them were to go out at any
time, so that after each fresh election, no matter how
tempestuous, a safe majority of the old members were to
remain undisturbed in their places. The conservative effect
of age was brought into play: Senators were to be at least
thirty years old, five years above the minimum set for the
lower house.

Opposite the legislature thus divided against itself was
set the President elected by yet another process—by a
special body of electors chosen as the state legislatures
might determine—perhaps two or three degrees removed

POPULISM AND REACTION 327

from the passions of the populace. Thus firmly planted
on his own base, the President was to enjoy, in addition to
his executive functions, the power of vetoing acts of Con-
gress. ‘Io increase the friction of the machine, his term
was fixed at four years, not two or six, and it was provided
that he could be removed only by a difficult method of
impeachment. |

Over against the executive and the legislature was placed
the Supreme Court composed of judges appointed, not for
two, four, or six years, but for life—judges chosen by the
President and the Senate, the two federal agencies removed
from direct contact with the populace—and in fact, as time
proved, endowed with the power of declaring acts of the
other departments null and void. As Hamilton explained,
the friends of good government thought that ‘“‘every insti-
tution calculated to restrain the excess of law making and
to keep things in the same state in which they happen to
be at any given period was more likely to do good than
harm.”

If this doctrine seemed strange to some who had just
raised and carried through a revolution, it fell with a
grateful sound upon the ears of those to whom it was
directed. The problem of accomplishing what they thought
good for the public interest and preventing the federal
government from doing things evil in their eyes was a per-
plexing one to the Fathers; but their ingenuity was equal
to the occasion. —

The recognition of the need for restraining the state gov-
ernments was also conspicuously present in their delibera-
tions. Under the influence of debt-burdened farmers, as
they well knew, several local legislatures had issued paper
money and so enabled debtors to discharge their obligations
more easily in depreciated currency. Such assaults on
vested rights the convention tried to terminate by declaring
in the Constitution that no state should emit bills of credit
or make anything but gold or silver coin legal tender in the
payment of debts. States had been negligent in paying their

328 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

public debts; they had enacted laws permitting private
debtors to pay in land or kind and be rid of their creditors;
they had passed laws delaying the collection of matured
debts and placing other obstacles in the way of such pro-
cedures; one of them had repealed the charter of an incor-
porated college; and they had done other things injurious
to the holders of personal property—as the Fathers rea-
soned, injurious to the public good. Accordingly the con-
vention, in recognition of private rights, wrote into the Con-
stitution a clause forbidding any state to impair the obliga-
tion of contracts.

Nor was it satisfied with that. Dangerous radicals in
Massachusetts had raised the standard of revolt against
law and order; such a thing might occur again and the
flames even spread. Therefore the Fathers provided that
the President could, on call from state authorities, send
troops to suppress domestic insurrection. In this way, the
convention sought to tame the spirits of local statesmen
who had run wild after the heavy yoke of the British gov-
ernment had been thrown off. In this way was reéstab-
lished in effect the old British system of politics, economics,
and judicial control—this time grounded on American au-
thority created by an American constitution.

§

Fully aware that their plan would be bitter medicine to
a large part of the public, the delegates were puzzled about
the best method of getting their instrument ratified. The
lawful constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and
the call under which the convention had been elected de- |
creed that their project should be laid before the existing
Congress for approval, transmitted to the states for rati-
fication, and go into effect only after receiving unanimous
consent. Now, the state legislatures, the Fathers knew by
bitter experience, had been the chief assailants of public
credit and private rights; they had repeatedly refused to

POPULISM AND REACTION 329

indorse restraints on their own powers and their unanimous
consent was hardly to be expected.

Having regard for realities. rather than theories, the
Fathers departed from the letter of the existing law in the
interest of higher considerations. They did, indeed, provide
that the new Constitution should be sent to the old Congress
as a matter of form but they advised the Congress merely
to pass the instrument along to the states with a recom-
mendation that special conventions be called to decide the
issue of ratification. Many citizens of the right sort, they
reasoned, who would not take the trouble to serve in a local
legislature, would be willing to participate in a ratifying
convention; if once the barrier of the populistic state legis-
latures could be forced, they saw hope of victory. ;

Still the specter of unanimous ratification remained.
After much debate on the point, the convention laid that
ghost by an audacious proposal, namely, that the Constitu-
tion should go into effect, as between the states concerned,
as soon as two-thirds had given their consent. This pro-
gram, the learned commentator, John W. Burgess, makes
plain, was a project for a revolution, a break with the pre-
vailing legal order, a coup d’état, an appeal over the heads
of established agencies to the voters, or at least to that
part of the electorate prepared to overthrow the Articles
of Confederation.

On September 17, after nearly four months of arduous
debate, the convention brought its labors to a close. The
Constitution was finished and the scheme for ratification
formulated. Aggrieved by the decisions of their col-
leagues, some members had gone home in anger and some
who stayed on refused to sign the document, denouncing
it openly and opposing its adoption by the people. On the
other hand, thirty-nine of the fifty-five members who had
attended one or more sessions put their names on the parch-
ment and sent it forth with their benediction, even though ©
they differed widely among themselves in the degree of
their enthusiasm for the common handiwork.

330 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Hamilton thought the new government would not be
powerful enough and entertained grave doubts about its
success. While admitting that they were merely ‘‘making
experiments in politics,’ and while expressing his disap-
proval of many provisions in the document, Franklin de-
clared his faith in divine guidance in the matter. Standing
then within the shadow of death, he wrote of the conven-
tion’s achievement: ‘‘I can hardly conceive a transaction of
such momentous importance to the welfare of millions now
existing and to exist in the posterity of a great nation should
be suffered to pass without being in some degree influenced,
guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and
beneficent Ruler, in whom all inferior spirits live and move
and have their being.”

With his customary practical view of things, Washington
doubtless voiced the general sentiment of his fellow signers
when he said: “The Constitution that is submitted is not
free from imperfections. But there are as few radical
defects in it as could well be expected, considering the heter-
ogeneous mass of which the Convention was composed and
the diversity of interests that are to be attended to. Asa
Constitutional door is opened for future amendments and
alterations, I think it would be wise in the people to accept
what is offered to them.”

On receiving at Paris reports of the proceedings at
Philadelphia, Jefferson was at first much troubled. He
thought that the proposed House of Representatives would
be incompetent to great tasks, that the President, aided by
the army, might become a dictator, and that the convention
should have been content to add a few sections to the
Articles of Confederation, “the good, old and venerable
fabric which should have been preserved even as a religious
relique.”’ Later, however, he changed his mind and on con-
sidering the possibilities of amendment came to the conclu-
sion that the Fathers had done about as well as human
circumstances permitted. In the end he came to view the
whole operation as a noble triumph for humanity. ‘The

POPULISM AND REACTION Sot

example,” he said, “of changing a constitution by assem-
bling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling
armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former
examples we have given them.”

§

Acting on the recommendations of the convention, the
Congress submitted the Constitution to the states for their
approval or rejection and in turn the local legislatures called
upon the voters to choose conventions to pass upon the new
project of government. In a trice the country was divided
into hostile camps as all the engines of propaganda and
political maneuvering were brought into play either to
carry or to defeat the plan for a new government. With a
bitterness that recalled the factional dispute in the revolu-
tionary party a few years before, both sides resorted to
strenuous tactics.

When, for example, certain opponents of the Constitu-
tion in the Pennsylvania legislature sought to win time for
deliberation by leaving their seats and breaking the quorum,
a federalist mob invaded their lodgings, dragged them
through the streets, and pushed them back into the assembly
room. Applauded by the victors, the vote was then taken
and the election of delegates to the state ratifying conven-
tion was fixed at a date only five weeks ahead, reducing to
the minimum the period allowed for taking ‘“‘the solemn
judgment of the people.”” Doubtless some gentlemen of the
old school entertained regrets that the new law had been
ushered in with disorder but the emergency was great.

Again when the New Hampshire convention met and a
majority opposed to the Constitution was discovered, the
assembly adjourned to prevent an adverse vote and give
the friends of the new instrument a chance to work on the
objectors. In one case haste, in the other delay, favored
ratification.

As the winter of 1787-88 advanced into spring, the con-

332 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

flict was waged at close quarters, with steady gains among
the supporters of the new form of government. Promptly
and with little tumult, four states, Connecticut, New Jersey,
Delaware, and Georgia—among the smallest and least pow-
erful members of the confederation—ratified the Con-
stitution. With similar promptness Pennsylvania added its
approval following the events narrated above. Equally
emphatic, Maryland and South Carolina, having given the
voters ample time for deliberation, decided with a generous
gesture in favor of ratification. In Virginia, where the
popular verdict was doubtful, the weight of great names,
such as Washington, Marshall, Randolph, and Wythe,
finally carried the day. In New Hampshire, New York,
and Massachusetts, where the election returned avowed
majorities opposed to the Constitution, a great deal of
clever engineering induced several delegates to depart from
their apparent instructions and cast their ballots for rati-
fication. But to the very end, two states, North Carolina
and Rhode Island, refused to give their consent, allowing
the new government to be erected without their aid and
remaining isolated until the pressure of powerful economic
forces brought them under the roof.

Intense as it was, the excitement that marked the struggle
did not bring out an avalanche of voters to express their
opinions at the polls. From the fragmentary figures that
are available, it appears that no more than one-fourth of
the adult white males in the country voted one way or the
other in the elections at which delegates to the state rati-
fying conventions were chosen. According to a cautious
reckoning, probably one-sixth of them—namely, one hun-
dred thousand—favored the ratification of the new form of
government. In any case, it is employing a juristic concept,
not summarizing statistical returns, to say that “‘the whole
people put restraints on themselves by adopting the
Constitution.” gh

Broadly speaking, the division of the voters over the
document ran along economic lines. The merchants, manu-

POPULISM AND REACTION 333

facturers, private creditors, and holders of public securities
loomed large among the advocates of the new system, while
the opposition came chiefly from the small farmers behind
the seaboard, especially from the men who, in earlier years,
had demanded paper money and other apparatus for easing
the strain of their debts. In favor of the Constitution,
wrote General Knox to Washington from Massachusetts
on January 12, 1788, was ‘“‘the commercial part of the state
to which are added all the men of considerable property,
the clergy, the lawyers—including all the judges of all the
courts, and all the officers of the late army, and also the
neighborhood of all great towns. . . . This party are for
vigorous government, perhaps many of them would have
been still more pleased with the new Constitution had it
been more analogous to the British Constitution.’’ In the
opposition, General Knox massed the ‘Insurgents or their
favorers, the great majority of whom are for the annihila-
tion of debts public and private.”

During the battle over ratification, advocates on both
sides produced a large and, in the main, illuminating litera-
ture on the science of human government, a literature
reminiscent of the grand style of the Revolution. Though
time has sunk most of it into oblivion, especially the argu-
ments of the defeated party, the noblest pieces of defense,
namely, the letters to the press written by Hamilton, Madi-
son, and Jay in support of the Constitution, were rescued
from the dust and given immortality under the name of The
Federalist.

In the tenth number of this great series, Madison, who
has been justly called the ‘“‘father of the Constitution” and
certainly may be regarded as a spokesman of the men who
signed it, made a cogent appeal for ratification on practical
grounds: ‘The first object of government”’ is the protec-
tion of ‘‘the diversity in the faculties of men, from which
the rights of property originate.”’ After enumerating the
chief classes of property holders which spring up inevitably
under such protection in modern society, Madison pro-

334 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ceeded to show that “the regulation of these various and
interfering interests forms the principal task of modern
legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in
the ordinary operations of the government.”’

Then Madison explained how political strife involved
economic concerns at every turn: ‘“‘The most common and
durable source of factions has been the various and unequal
distribution of property. Those who hold and those who
are without property have ever formed distinct interests
in society. ‘Chose who are creditors and those who are
debtors fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest,
a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed
interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in
civilized nations and divide them into different classes actu-
ated by different sentiments and views. ... From the
protection of different and unequal faculties of acquir-
ing property, the possession of different degrees and
kinds of property immediately results; and from the influ-
ence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective
proprietors, ensues a division of society into different in-
terests and parties.”

Of necessity, according to Madison’s logic, legislatures
reflect these interests. ‘‘What,” he asks, ‘‘are the different
classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes
which they determine?” For this there is no help. ‘‘The
causes of factions cannot be removed,’ and “we know
from experience that neither moral nor religious motives
can be relied upon as an adequate control.’ Since that is
true, there arises a grave danger, namely, the danger that
certain groups, particularly the propertyless masses, may
fuse into an overbearing majority and sacrifice to its will the
interests of the minority. Given this peril, it followed that
a fundamental problem before the Philadelphia convention
had been to “secure the public good and private rights
against the danger of such a faction and at the same time
preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”’ And
the solution offered was in the check and balance system

POPULISM AND REACTION 335

which refined and enlarged public views “by passing them
through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.’’ This,
in the language of a leading Father, was the spirit of the
new Constitution—the substance of a powerful appeal to
all practical men of affairs.

By argument, by negotiation, and by the weight of per-
sonality the friends of the proposed revolution triumphed
inthe end. On June 21, 1788, the ninth state, New Hamp-
shire, ratified the Constitution and the new system could
then go into effect as between the parties that had sealed
the contract. Within a few weeks, Virginia and New York,
aware that the die had already been cast, gave their reluc-
tant consent. With victory thus doubly assured, the fed-
eralists could ignore the smoldering anger of the opposition
that had proposed many amendments and could laugh at
the solemn resolve of New York calling for another na-
tional assembly to modify the Constitution. Leaving North
Carolina and Rhode Island still outside the fold uncon-
vinced of its advantages, the old Congress made ready to
disband by calling elections for the choice of men to consti-
tute the personnel of the new government.

CHAPTER VIII

The Rise of National Parties

HE controversy over the ratification of the federal
Constitution had not died away when the country
was summoned to take part in a contest over the
election of men to direct the new government. In this
struggle the disputants appealed to the passions that had
been invoked in the previous battle, but they now encoun-
tered among the people an astonishing indifference. Sena-
tors and presidential electors were chosen by the state legis-
lators without arousing any popular uproar. There were, it
is true, lively skirmishes in a few congressional districts, but,
as a rule, Representatives were returned by a handful of
voters. In Maryland and Massachusetts, for example, not
more than one-sixth of the adult males took part in the bal-
loting for members of the lower house. As many times be-
fore in history, an informed and active minority managed
the play.
When the results of the poll were all in and the new
government was organized, it was patent to everyone that
the men who had made the recent constitutional revolution

336

THE NATIONAL PARTIES OOW

were carrying on the work they had begun in 1787. Wash-
ington, the chairman of the constitutional convention, was
unanimously chosen President of the United States. Of the
twenty-four Senators in the first Congress under the Consti-
tution, eleven had helped to draft “the new charter of
liberty.” In the House of Representatives was a strong —
contingent from the body of framers and ratifiers, with
the “father of the Constitution,’ James Madison, in the
foreground. The Ark of the Covenant was evidently in
the house of its friends; or, to put the matter in another
way, the machinery of economic and political power was
mainly directed by the men who had conceived and estab-
lished it. And very soon the executive and judicial depart-
ments were filled with leaders who had taken part in
framing or ratifying the Constitution.

For the most important post in his administration,
namely, that of the Treasury, Washington chose Robert
Morris, a member of the convention; when that gentleman
declined, he turned to another colleague, Alexander Ham-
ilton, a giant of Federalism. For the office of Attorney
General, the President selected the spokesman of the Vir-
ginia delegation at the Philadelphia assembly, Edmund
Randolph. As Secretary of War, he appointed another
ardent advocate of the Constitution, General Knox, of
Massachusetts. Only one high administrative command
went to a statesman whose views on the new government
were, to say the least, uncertain; Thomas Jefferson, who
had been in Paris during the formation and adoption of the
Constitution, was made Secretary of State in charge of
foreign affairs. In the judicial department, there was not
a single exception: all the federal judgeships created under
the Judiciary Act of 1789, high and low, were given to
men who had helped to draft the Constitution or had sup-
ported it in state conventions or in the ratifying campaigns.
In his appointments to minor places in the government
Washington was equally discreet; after attempting to con-
ciliate a few opponents by offering them positions, he flatly

338 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

declared that he would not give an office to any man who
attacked the principles of his administration.

The first government was thus in no sense a coalition.
When the paper document of Philadelphia became a reality,
it lived on in the reason and will of the men who had con-
structed and adopted it. It was they who enacted the laws,
enforced the decrees, raised the army, and collected the
taxes, and so made the new Constitution an instrument of
power in the direction of national economy and in the dis-
tribution of wealth. In their hands mere words on parch-
ment were transformed into an engine of sovereign com-
pulsion that could not be denied anywhere throughout the
length and breadth of the land.

§

Shortly after noon on April 30, 1789, George Washing-
ton, escorted by a small guard of cavalry, a committee of
Congress, and a cheering throng of citizens, rode from his
residence in New York to the new Federal Hall in Wall
Street, where, on the balcony of the building facing Broad
Street, he took the oath of office as first President of the
United States. Immediately afterward, Chancellor Liv-
ingston, who had administered the pledge, turned to the
crowd below and cried out: ‘‘Long live George Washing-
ton, President of the United States!’ The cry was repeated
in the streets and the rest of the day given over to cele-
brating the great event. Since both houses of Congress
. were now in session, the new government of America was
ready for the heavy tasks ahead—the formulation of laws
and policies contemplated by the Constitution.

For guidance these directors of affairs had before them,
of course, the customs established under the Articles of
Confederation but at best such practices formed a poor
sailing chart for a government differently constructed and
endowed with more extensive powers, in particular for the
executive department. Accordingly Washington had to

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 339

make precedents of his own, with the advice of his friends.
His message to Congress he read with grave dignity before
the two houses in joint assembly—giving a touch of the
regal manner to American legislative procedure. ‘The prac-
tice of calling the chief officers of the administration to-
gether in conference was early adopted, marking the origin
of the Cabinet, a modified form of that English institution.
As far as he deemed it compatible with public interest,
Washington rewarded with civil appointments his compan-
ions in the war of the Revolution whose sacrifices and
financial condition made them ‘“‘worthy objects of public
recognition.” In his dealings with the Senate, he sought to
establish the custom of consulting that body formally, and
in person, about treaties in process of negotiation; but the
Senators, feeling constrained by his presence, gave him such
stiff and frigid receptions that he finally forsook his plan.

In the sphere of administration it was also necessary to
break new ground and after making arrangements for tem-
porary revenue, Congress turned to the pressing task of com-
pleting the machinery of government. The management
of foreign affairs, finance, and defense on land and sea was
committed to appropriate departments: State, Treasury,
and War respectively. Anticipating a growth in the legal
requirements of the government, Congress instituted the
ofice of Attorney General. Since the post-office was
already in operation, it continued the system without much
alteration.

The judicial branch of the government was established
by the Judiciary Act of 1789, one of the most remarkable
pieces of legislation in the history of this continent. With
elaborate detail the law provided for a Supreme Court com-
posed of a Chief Justice and five associates and a federal
district court for each state with its own attorney, marshal,
and appropriate number of deputies. Such were the agen-
cies of power created to make the will of the national gov-
ernment a living force in every community from New
Hampshire to Georgia, from the seaboard to the frontier.

340 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

In keeping with the spirit of the new order, precautions
were taken to bring state courts and state legislatures under
federal control. After contriving an ingenious system of
appeals for carrying cases up to the federal Supreme Court,
the framers of the Judiciary Act devised a process by which
the measures of the local governments could be nullified
whenever they came into conflict with the federal Consti-
tution. The terms of the law were explicit. If a state
court, having final jurisdiction over any matter, declared
an act of Congress void, or if it upheld as valid an act of a
state legislature, an appeal could be taken to the high tri-
bunal at the national capital, just as to London in colonial
times. Every citizen whose personal liberty or property
rights under the Constitution were put in jeopardy by neigh-
boring political authorities now had an agency of relief at
hand—an agency independent of local authorities, drawing
its financial, moral, and physical force from the center.
In a word, something like the old British imperial control
over provincial legislatures was reéstablished, under judicial
bodies chosen indirectly and for life, within the borders of
the United States.

While creating the offices of the new government in
detail and endowing them with the powers required to give
effect to its decisions, Congress was well aware that it was
necessary to soften some of the opposition to the new
régime with measures of conciliation. The directors of fed-
eral affairs knew by what narrow margin the approval of
the Constitution had been wrung from a reluctant people.
They saw North Carolina and Rhode Island still outside
the Union and unrepentant. ‘They had before them a large
number of amendments proposed by several of the state
conventions and they were assured by any number of the
critics that promises to carry some of the demands into
immediate effect had been made in winning the votes neces-
sary to ratification. All these amendments, as Congress
could not fail to see, showed a fear of the federal govern-
ment and suggested restraints on its authority. Although

THE NATIONAL PARTIES £5, 3

some were harmless enough, others betrayed the spirit of
Daniel Shays, who, if vanquished, was by no means dead.

To allay, if not remove, the temper expressed in several
of the propositions, Madison, therefore, presented in the
House of Representatives, and the first Congress adopted,
a series of amendments to the Constitution, ten of which
were soon ratified and in 1791 became a part of the law
of the land. Among other things, these amendments stipu-
lated that Congress should make no law respecting the
establishment of religion, abridging freedom of speech or
press, or the right of the people to assemble peaceably and
petition the government for a redress of grievances. Indict-
ment by grand jury and trial by jury were guaranteed to all
persons charged by federal officers with serious crimes.
Finally, to soften the wrath of provincial politicians, it was
announced in the Tenth Amendment that all powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution or with-
held by it from the states were reserved to the states respec-
tively or to the people.

This overt declaration of the obvious was supplemented
seven years later by the Eleventh Amendment, written in
the same spirit, forbidding the federal judiciary to hear any
case in which a state was sued by a citizen. Assured by the
friendly professions of the national government and con-
strained by economic necessity, North Carolina joined the
Union in November, 1789, and Rhode Island in May of
the following year.

§

With the machinery of administration in operation and
professions respecting natural rights duly made, the direc-
tors of the federal government were free to devote them-
selves to prime questions of financial, commercial, and
industrial legislation. In fact, while the philosophers were
discussing the constitutional amendments, Hamilton, Secre-
tary of the Treasury, was formulating the great system and
the collateral reports forever associated with his name.

342 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

First upon his program was the funding of the entire na-
tional debt, domestic and foreign, principal and interest, at
face value, approximating altogether $50,000,000; in other
words, old bonds and certificates were to be called in and
new securities issued. A part of this enormous sum was
to bear interest at six per cent and a part at three per cent,
while the interest on the remainder was to be deferred for
ten years.

In the second place, Hamilton proposed that the national
government assume at face value the revolutionary obliga-
tions of the states, amounting to about $20,000,000, and
add them to the debt carried by the general treasury. In
this fashion he intended to make secure the financial stand-
ing of the United States and force all the public creditors
to look to the federal government rather than the states
for the payment of the sums due them. To provide a
capstone for his financial structure, Hamilton advocated the
creation of a national bank in which the government and
private investors were to be represented. ‘Three-fourths
of the capital stock of this institution was to consist of new
six per cent federal bonds and the rest of specie. With a
view to assisting the government and the security holders
in buoying up the public credit, that is, the prices of federal
bonds, provision was to be made for a sinking fund from
which the Treasury could buy its securities in the market
from time to time.

To sustain this magnificent paper edifice erected on the
taxing power of the federal government, duties were to be
laid on imports in such a manner as to encourage and pro-
tect American industry and commerce. Finally, the public
lands in the West, which the Crown of Britain had once
sought to wrest from colonial politicians, were to be sold
and the securities of the federal government were to be
accepted in payment. :

It required no very profound economic insight to grasp
the import of the Hamiltonian program: holders of the
old debt—continental and state—were simply to exchange

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 343

their depreciated paper at face value for new bonds bearing
interest and guaranteed by a government that possessed
ample taxing power. Prime public securities, such as were
now to be issued, would readily pass as money from hand
to hand, augmenting the fluid capital of the country and
stimulating commerce, manufacturing, and agriculture. If
the government bonds failed to realize all expectations in
the line of capital expansion, notes issued by the United
States bank were to supply the deficiency. At last Ameri-
can business enterprise, which had suffered from the want
of currency and credit, was to be abundantly furnished with
both and at the same time protected against foreign com-
petition by favorable commercial legislation. Naturally
those who expected to reap the benefits from Hamilton’s
system were delighted with the prospects. On the other
hand, since the whole financial structure rested on taxation,
mere owners of land and consumers of goods, on whom most
of the burden was to fall, got it into their heads that they
were to pay the bills of the new adventure.

As the issues raised by Hamilton’s projects came before
the people one by one, the tide of political passion rose
higher and higher. It was well known that a large part,
perhaps the major portion, of the old bonds, state and con-
tinental, had passed from the hands of the original pur-
chasers into the coffers of shrewd and enterprising specu-
lators. After the adoption of the Constitution became cer-
tain, far-sighted financiers sent agents all over the country,
especially into the southern states, with bags of precious
specie, bought enormous quantities of depreciated paper
at a low figure—sometimes ten or fifteen cents on the dollar
—and effected a great concentration of public securities in
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Inevitably the cupid-
ity of those who had risked their money in this speculation
and the anguish of those who had sold their original certifi-
cates at merely nominal prices furnished the fuel for an
explosion when Hamilton’s fiscal plans appeared on the
political carpet.

344 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

One group in Congress, not very large, immediately
proposed to scale down the old debts by buying the obliga-
tions at market, instead of face, value. By members of this
faction it was contended that very little of the outstanding
paper represented specie paid into the continental treasury,
that to a marked degree the debt represented goods bought
at inflated prices and depreciated notes accepted by the
revolutionary government when loans were floated.
Although there was much truth in this argument, it was
unpalatable to the party bent on funding at face value; and
those who advanced it could make no headway against the
current of opinion in Congress, where a number of security-
holding members united with the friends of public credit
in strenuously resisting every proposal that savored of re-
pudiation.

A second congressional group, just as eager as Hamilton
to restore public credit, was especially solicitous for the
welfare of veterans of the Revolution, original purchasers
of bonds, and men who had sold supplies to the revolu-
tionary government. ‘To this party Madison adhered. In
a long and careful speech, he analyzed the merits of the
controversy. Everyone admitted, he said, that a sacred
duty was laid upon the government to pay for value
received with lawful interest but it was entirely proper to
debate one point, namely, to whom payment should be
made. By common concession at the head of the list of
creditors were the original investors who still retained
their securities; no one could deny their right to have a
full discharge of their claims.

Next in order were the original purchasers who had sold
their holdings at a low price and the speculators who had
purchased paper in the market. The former could right-
fully appeal to public faith because they had furnished
values and services to the government and, after being
treated with neglect and contempt, had been compelled to
sell their certificates on ruinous terms. On the other hand,
those who had bought securities on speculation had some

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 345

claims: they had incurred risks, they held the paper bear-
ing a definite promise to pay, they could with reason point
to the maxim that the literal fulfillment of obligations is
the best foundation of public credit. Yet to pay both the
speculative purchasers and the original holders was obvi-
ously impossible.

Therefore, urged Madison, let a composition be made;
let the former have the highest price that has prevailed
on the market and the latter the difference between the face
value and the market price. This project, he confessed,
would not do perfect justice but would more nearly meet
the requirements of honor than any other plan yet proposed.
Powerful as was his plea, he could not carry the House
of Representatives with him; his proposal was defeated by
a vote of thirty-six to thirteen, on February 22, 1790.
Having rejected all compromise measures, Congress re-
solved that the continental debt shouid be funded at face
value.

After carrying the first redoubt, the champions of Ham-
ilton’s system turned with confidence to the assumption of
state debts. In a way, they reasoned, those debts were
likewise national—incurred in a common cause—but they
also emphasized the argument that the funding of such
floating obligations would increase the fluid capital of the
country, attach men by their self-interests to the national
government, and stimulate the circulation of money. What-
ever weight was in this plea, opponents of assumption,
especially from the South, were not impressed thereby. A
large part of the state securities, as we have said, was now
in the hands of northern speculators and taxes to support
the national debt would fall mainly on consumers of taxable
imports. Accordingly, in the eyes of the critics, assumption
appeared to be a scheme to enrich manipulators principally
at the expense of the planters and farmers who imported
manufactures and paid taxes. At all events, the argument
in this vein was temporarily effective; the faction that ac-
cepted it was large and determined; and on April 12, 1790,

346 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

assumption was defeated in the popular branch of Congress
—the House of Representatives.

To the statesmen from the planting South, this result
seemed to mark a triumph over the commercial North. In
any event, an observant politician, after witnessing the de-
feat of assumption, immediately wrote to a friend in Vir-
ginia, in a vein of good humor: ‘Last Monday Mr.
Sedgwick (of Massachusetts) delivered a funeral oration
on the death of Miss Assumption. . . . Her death was
much lamented by her parents who were from New Eng-
land. Mr. Sedgwick being the most celebrated preacher
was requested to deliver her funeral eulogium. It was done
with puritanic gravity. . . . Sixty-one of the political
fathers of the nation were present and a crowded audience
of weapers and rejoicers. Mrs. Speculator was the chief
mourner and acted her part to admiration; she being the
mother of Miss Assumption who was the hope of her
family. . . . Mrs. Excise may have cause to rejoice because
she will be screened from much drudgery—as she must have
been the principal support of Miss Assumption as well as
of her mother and all her relations. Mrs. Direct Tax may
rest more easy in Virginia as she will not be called into
foreign service.” Unfortunately for the writer, however,
his pean of rejoicing proved to be premature, for a motion
to reconsider was immediately made and, as Senator
Maclay, of Pennsylvania, wrote in his diary, ‘Speculation
wiped a tear from either eye.”

Given a new hope by this action, Hamilton and his
supporters now worked furiously for weeks to convert
enough opponents to carry assumption through the House.
In the midst of their operations, Jefferson returned from
Paris to take up his labors as head of the Department of
State, and Hamilton in desperation begged the new Secre-
tary to bring his influence to bear on southern members.
For half an hour, he walked Jefferson up and down before
President Washington’s residence explaining to him that
the fate of the Constitution depended upon the passage of

THE NATIONAL PARTIES BAT

the assumption bill, that the creditor states were ready to
secede if the project could not be realized.

Impressed by the pathetic anxiety of Hamilton and eager
to save the Union, Jefferson arranged a dinner party to be
attended by certain interested politicians. The moment
the company assembled, he discovered that assumption was
indeed a bitter pill to southern congressmen and that some-
thing would have to be done to sweeten it. It was only
after much argument that a compromise was reached in
which it was agreed on the one side that two members
should change their minds and vote for assumption while
Robert Morris of Pennsylvania should manage certain
other Representatives; and on the other side, in exchange,
that the national capital should be finally located on
the banks of the Potomac after a ten year period in
Philadelphia.

“And so,” Jefferson wrote long afterward, ‘‘the assump-
tion was passed and twenty millions of stock divided among
the favored states and thrown in as pabulum to the stock-
jobbing herd.” On August 4, 1790, the grand bill for
funding the national and state debts became a law. Inci-
dentally Congress provided that the bills of credit issued
during the Revolution by the Continental Congress should
be redeemed at one cent on the dollar, a low figure,
practically amounting to the repudiation of two or three
hundred millions of paper—which caused deep sorrow
among the speculators who had also hoped to reap a rich
harvest in that field of business enterprise. In fact the
tender was so trivial that only a small part of the currency
was ever brought in for redemption; most of it simply per-
ished in the hands of the holders.

After a short recess, Congress took up the third of
Hamilton’s proposals, the establishment of a United
States Bank. On December 14, the Secretary’s report deal-
ing with the subject was made public; and five weeks later
the Senate passed a bill in conformity with his reeommenda-
tions. ‘Thereupon an animated debate occurred in the

348 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

House, where the passions of the people at large were more
accurately reflected. Indeed, the discussion became so acri-
monious and Jefferson supported the opposition with such
vehemence that Washington became alarmed.

For his own guidance in the storm, he asked the members
of his Cabinet for written opinions on the constitutionality
of the measure, receiving in response two important state
papers: one by Hamilton defending the bill and the other
by Jefferson and Randolph opposing it—two great exposi-
tions of the Constitution giving the liberal and the strict
constructions of that instrument of government.

On reading these opinions, Washington was convinced
that the Bank was sound in law and in economy and as soon
as the House concurred with the Senate by passing the bill,
he signed it, on February 25, 1791. According to its
provisions, the charter of the Bank was to run for twenty
years; one-fifth of the $10,000,000 stock was to be sub-
scribed by the government; the headquarters of the institu-
tion were to be at Philadelphia and branches were to be
established in other cities at the discretion of the directors.
Besides being empowered to engage in a general banking
business, it could issue notes under certain restrictions; and
its notes, redeemable in coin, were made legal tenders for
all payments due the United States.

Having successfully weathered three great political gales,
Hamilton took up the question of protection for American
industries. On December 5, 1791, he presented in a
voluminous Report on Manufactures a powerful argument
for the promotion of business enterprise under the shelter
of tariffs and bounties. The benefits of such a system, he
said, included a more extensive use of machinery, the em-
ployment of classes not otherwise profitably employed—
such as women and children “‘of a tender age’’—the encour-
agement of immigration, the opening of more ample and
varied opportunities for talent and skill, and the creation
of a steady demand for the surplus produce of the soil.
Hamilton then went into detail, specifying the desirable ob-

THEONGTIONALS PARTIES 349

jects of protection, such as iron, copper, lead, coal, wood,
skins, grain, hemp, wool, silk, glass, paper, and sugar.

In his proposals there was nothing altogether strange.
The first revenue act of 1789, though designed primarily
for revenue, had declared in favor of protection as a
principle; and Washington had already committed himself
to the doctrine that Congress should promote American
industries and render the country “independent of others
for essential, particularly for military, supplies.” But
Hamilton raised the tariff to the level of an economic phi-
losophy and forced the country to consider it as an Amer-
ican economic system. In the revenue act of 1792, Congress
carried out with modifications the suggestions made by the
Secretary of the Treasury, giving particular attention to
duties that would afford assistance to American industry.

§

During the prolix and hot-tempered debates that marked
the passage of Hamilton’s measures through Congress, the
country gradually divided into two parties, which grew
steadily in coherence of organization and in definiteness of
program. To speak more concretely, the antagonism be-
tween agriculture and business enterprise that had been so
marked in colonial times and had found tense expression
during the contest over the Constitution now bore fruit in
regular political parties, each with a complete parapher-
nalia of leaders, caucuses, conventions, names, symbols, and
rhetorical defense mechanisms. Candidates were nomi-
nated, policies proclaimed, newspapers edited, and spoils
distributed with reference to the fortunes of one group or
the other. All the passions that go with war were enlisted
in contests that eventuated in a counting of heads.

As these two party factions in one form or another have
continued to divide the nation, statesmen and theorists have
felt called upon to expound the causes of such political an-
tagonisms. Some agree with Macaulay in tracing the origins

350 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION —

of party to instinctive differences among people. In every
country, that celebrated Whig once declared, there is a
party of order and a party of progress; the former, con-
servative in temper, clings to established things, while the
latter, adventurous in spirit, is eager to make experiments.
Long afterward a literary critic, Brander Matthews, ap-
plied the Macaulay doctrine of innate ideas to American
politics; “intuitive Hamiltonians,” he said, believe in goy-
ernment by the well-born, while “intuitive Jeffersonians”’
love and trust the common people. Still another explana-
tion of American parties, one more commonly accepted by
Fourth of July orators, is that formulated by James Bryce
in [The American Commonwealth: our parties originally
sprang from differences of opinion concerning the nature
and functions of the Union; one exalts federal authority,
the other cherishes the rights of the states.

In reality, however, none of these simple explanations
does more than skim the surface of politics. None throws
any light on the origins of the innate tendencies, for ex-
ample. With reference to that point all are as cryptic
as the statement that God made Federalists and Republi-
cans. Why did one group of politicians take a liberal view
of the Constitution and another a narrow view? Whence
came the intuitions that divide men? Have they existed
since the dawn of history? Why did some trust the people
and others fear them? Was it an accident that a New
York lawyer stood at the head of the party which despised
the masses and a Virginia slave owner led the party which
professed democratic faith in the multitude?

The answers to these questions, as far as they are forth-
coming at all, lie in the professions of politicians, reported
in congressional debates, newspapers, letters, and partisan
pamphlets of the Hamiltonian epoch, and if such evidence
is to be accepted in court, the causes of the party division
were more substantial than matters of temperament or
juristic theory. By the time the partisan battle began to
rage in full fury, the Federalists had a positive record of

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 351

achievement to which they could point with pride and assur-
ance. [hey had restored the public credit by funding the
continental and state obligations at face value, incidentally
enriching thousands of good Federalists in the process.
They had protected American industry and shipping by
appropriate economic discriminations against foreign enter-
prise.

In establishing a national bank and a mint for the
coinage of metals, they had provided a uniform national
currency for the transaction of business. They had devised
a scheme of taxation easily yielding adequate revenues to
sustain the huge national debt and all the capitalistic under-
takings which rested upon that solid foundation. ‘They had
erected a system of national courts in which citizens of one
state could effectively collect claims against citizens of other
states and they had made it impossible for debtors to outwit
their creditors through the medium of paper money and
similar methods of impairing the obligation of contracts.
They had begun to build an army and a navy, making the
American nation so respected abroad that foreign powers
no longer dared to treat its ministers with contempt, and
giving the flag such substantial significance that the Yankee
skipper felt proud and secure under it no matter whether
he rode into the waters of European ports, traded
rum for Negroes along the African coast, or exchanged
notions in Canton for tea and silks. ‘That was an accom-
plishment measurable in terms of national honor and pride
as clearly as in the outward and visible signs of economic
prosperity.

Opponents of this general program, taking at first the
negative title of Anti-Federalists and later the more eupho-
nious name of Republicans, by no means attacked the idea
of exalting American credit and improving the standing
of the country among the nations of the earth. In detail,
however, they dissented, with varying emphasis, from the
propositions contained in the Federalist economic program.
They wished to discharge the national debt but not in such —

352 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a fashion as to enrich speculators or impose a heavy burden
of taxation on the masses. Especially were they tender of
the people engaged in agriculture. A permanent funded
debt and a national bank founded on it, they complained,
would tax the farmers and planters to sustain an army of
bond holders and stock jobbers.

Speaking on this theme for southern citizens, one Anti-
Federalist warned the House of Representatives that his
constituents “will feel that continued drain of specie which
must take place to satisfy the appetites of basking specu-
lators at the seat of Government. . . . Connecticut manu-
factures a great deal. Georgia manufactures nothing and
imports everything. Therefore, Georgia, although her
population is not near so large, contributes more to the
public treasury by impost.’”’ When the proposal to estab-
lish a national bank was before Congress, the same agrarian
orator lamented in a similar strain that “this plan of a
National Bank is calculated to benefit a small part of the
United States, the mercantile interest only; the farmers, the
yeomanry, will derive no advantage from it.’ When the
unwrought-steel schedule of the tariff bill was under con-
sideration, Lee, of Virginia, declared that “it would oper-
ate as an oppressive though indirect tax upon agriculture,
and any tax, whether direct or indirect, upon this interest
at this juncture would be unwise and impolitic.”’

In Five Letters Addressed to the Yeomanry of the
United States, a vehement pamphleteer of Philadelphia de-
clared, in 1792, that the laws of the Union were “stained
with mercantile regulations impolitic in themselves and
highly injurious to the agricultural interests of our country ;
with funding systems by which the property and rights of
poor but meritorious citizens are sacrificed to wealthy game-
sters and speculators; with the establishment of Banks au-
thorizing a few men to create fictitious money by which they
may acquire rapid fortunes without industry.”

Other pamphleteers and partisan editors, writing with
a kind of philosophic completeness, denounced the Hamil-

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 353

tonian system root and branch, in the name of the Anti-
Federalist faction. Boiled down, their heated arguments
amounted to this: the financial interests associated with the
funding of the debt, the management of the sinking fund,
the control of the Bank, and the protection of industry and
commerce by favorable laws have taken possession of the
federal government; they operate through the Treasury
Department and through the ‘‘stock-jobbing’’? members of
Congress; every fiscal and commercial measure adopted at
the national capital imposes a burden on agriculture and
labor for the benefit of these dominant interests. In a
word, the Anti-Federalist leaders saw in Hamilton’s poli-
cies schemes for exploiting farmers, planters, and laborers
for the benefit of capitalists, shipowners, and manufac-
turers.

Far from being the mere froth of excited politicians, this
view represented the matured convictions of leaders given
to deliberation and analysis. In several letters addressed
confidentially to Washington, Jefferson expounded the eco-
nomic grievances of his faction. He argued that the na-
tional debt had been unnecessarily increased; that the
United States Bank had been created as a permanent engine
of the moneyed interest for influencing the course of goy-
ernment; and that “‘the ten or twelve per cent annual profits
paid to the lenders of this paper medium are taken out
of the pockets of the people who would have had without
interest the coin it is banishing; that all capital employed
in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing like
that on a gaming-table no accession to itself and is with-
drawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have
produced addition to the common mass; that it nourishes
our citizens in habits of vice and idleness instead of industry
and morality; that it has furnished effectual means of cor-
rupting such a portion of the Legislature as turns the bal-
ance between the honest voters whichever way it is di-
rected.’ Of all the mischiefs which Jefferson saw in the
Federalist system, “none is so afflicting and fatal to every

354 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

honest hope as the corruption of the legislature.’ Of
course, Jefferson expressed his alarm over the liberal way
in which the Constitution had been construed by the men
who formulated and enacted Federalist policies into law,
but the gravamen of his complaint was that Hamilton’s
economic measures exploited one section of society for the
benefit of another.

Of the numerous counts in the indictment brought against
the Federalists by their opponents, none stung and blistered
as much as the charge that members of Congress were
enriching themselves by speculating in federal bonds and
bank stock. Without any reservations, Jefferson emphati-
cally declared that the grand outlines of Hamilton’s sys-
tem had been carried ‘“‘by the votes of the very persons
who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves
out to profit by his plans”; and he added that “‘had these
persons withdrawn, as those interested in a question ever
should, the vote of the disinterested majority was clearly
the reverse of what they had made it.”’

In two bitter pamphlets, John Taylor, of Virginia, lam-
basted the “‘stock-jobbing interest in Congress,”’ even daring
to print in thin disguise the names of Senators and Repre-
sentatives who, according to rumor, held government securi-
ties and were interested in the Bank. ‘To this indictment
Federalist editors and politicians replied in terse language.
Indignantly denouncing Taylor’s statements as slanderous
and mendacious, they called for demonstrations and insisted
that, until substantiated, the allegation “must be regarded
as an impotent piece of malice, contemptible alike for its
falsehood and its cowardice.”’

It was, of course, impossible for the Anti-Federalists
to prove their charges, for the simple reason that they
could not get access to the records of the Treasury Depart-
ment while the Federalists were in control. When finally,
in 1801, the Jeffersonians in their turn were about to take
possession of the government, a fire occurred in the Treas-
ury destroying many of the books and papers containing

THE NATIONAL PARTIES B55

the evidence in the case. By that date the issue had become
academic.

More than a hundred years later, however—after the
records of the federal loan offices in the several states had
been collected in Washington—an examination confirmed
the Anti-Federalist indictment. It showed that at least
twenty-nine members of the first Congress held federal
securities, that some members were extensive operators in
public funds during their term of service, and that the list
of names given out by John Taylor was astonishingly ac-
curate. Jefferson, therefore, spoke truly when he said that
the assumption of state debts could never have been carried
if the men who profited by the operation had abstained
from voting, on the ground that they were personally in-
terested in it. !

Yet it is difficult to see why holders of government bonds
were to be denounced for voting in favor of measures
affecting their concerns while slave owners were to be par-
doned for voting down the Quaker memorials against
slavery presented to Congress on March 23, 1790. In
fact, Jefferson himself frankly stated that he wanted ‘‘the
agricultural interest’ to govern the country and presumably
to pursue policies advantageous to that social group. At
bottom, accordingly, the dispute between parties was over
economic measures rather than over questions of political
propriety.

And the constitutional doctrines and political theories
that sprang from this controversy bore a very precise rela-
tion to the position taken by the respective parties. The
accomplishment of Hamilton’s purposes called for a lib-
eral, even an extensive use of the powers conferred upon
Congress, and for the imposition of heavy taxes on the
masses to sustain the fiscal structure. Wanting above all to
gain certain economic ends, the Federalist party natu-
rally came to the conclusion that the Constitution was to be
construed freely enough to permit a straight march to the
goal. Moreover, since it was the farmers and mechanics

356 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

rather than the rich and well-born who stood out against
Hamilton’s system, it was equally natural that its sponsors
should fear the triumph of the populace at the polls. On
the other side, opponents of that system, forming as they
did the party of negation, seized upon every weapon at
hand that would help to block the measures they heartily
disliked and, by a strict interpretation of the Constitution,
discovered legal prohibitions on Federalist proposals.

This was all natural enough in a country so largely
dominated by lawyers trained in dialectics, but the intelli-
gent men who made use of such juristic implements were
under no delusions about the sources of their thinking.
‘“The judgment is so much influenced by the wishes, the
affections, and the general theories of those by whom any
political proposition is decided,” laconically wrote John
Marshall with respect to the Bank, “that a contrariety of
opinion on this great constitutional question ought to excite
no surprise.’’ On both sides the logicians were equally able
and equally sincere; hence it seems reasonable to conclude
that neither interpretation of the Constitution, liberal or
strict, flowed with the force of exigent mathematics from
the language of the instrument itself.

Nevertheless, the politicians and statesmen of the period
made much of their appeals to correct views of the Con-
stitution. Leaders of the Federalist party had been largely
responsible for the framing and adoption of that document;
they understood it; and they demonstrated with a great
show of learning that it authorized whatever they wanted it
to sanction. The opposition employed the same appeal—
for contrary ends. ‘It is unconstitutional,’ was the cry
that rose daily from the Anti-Federalist ranks as they
sought to dethrone Hamiltonism. “Let us return to the
Constitution!’ exclaimed John Taylor when closing a vitri-
olic indictment of the Secretary’s program and policies. “I
scarce know a point,’’ groaned Fisher Ames, “which has not
produced this cry, not excepting a motion for adjournment.
. . . Lhe fishery bill was unconstitutional; it was uncon-

THE NATION AL PARTIES 357

stitutional to receive plans of finance from the Secretary;
to give bounties; to make the militia worth having; order is
unconstitutional; credit is ten fold worse.’ If some of the
minor politicians thought their linguistic pattern flowered
inexorably from unanswerable premises, there is no doubt
that the first thinkers who sat at the loom weaving the
texture of American constitutional theory, knew what and
how they were designing. It remained for smaller men to
treat federal jurisprudence as one of America’s Eleusinian
mysteries.

In its stark passion the substance of the controversy was
brought home to the participants in 1794 when one of
Hamilton’s measures evoked an explosion. To aid in meet-
ing the increased charges caused by the assumption of state
debts, Congress in 1791 after a savage debate passed an
excise law laying, among other things, a tax on spirits
distilled from grain—an act especially irritating to farmers
in the interior already marshaling under opposition ban.
ners. Largely owing to the bad roads, which made it hard
for them to carry bulky crops to markets, they had adopted
the practice of turning their corn and rye into whiskey—
a concentrated product that could be taken to town on
horseback over the worst trails and through the deepest
mud. So extensive was the practice in the western regions
of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, that nearly
every farmer was manufacturing liquor on a small scale;
the first of these states alone according to the reckoning
had five thousand distilleries. “The excise law, therefore,
provided in effect that government officers should enter
private homes, measure the produce of the stills, and take
taxes for it directly from the pockets of the farmers.

As soon as the news of this excise bill reached the in-
terior, an uprising followed—an outbreak of such propor-
tions that Congress, frightened by the extent of popular
dissatisfaction, removed the tax from the smallest stills and
quieted the farmers of Virginia and North Carolina. In
Pennsylvania, however, the resistance stiffened. Some of

358 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the distillers in that state positively refused to pay the
tax; while rioters sacked and burned the houses of the col-
lectors just as Revolutionists thirty years earlier had vented
their wrath upon King George’s agents for trying to sell
stamps. When at length a United States marshal at-
tempted to arrest certain offenders in the summer of 1794,
a revolt known as the Whiskey Rebellion flared up, result-
ing in wounds and death.

Stirred by reports of these incidents from the field, Ham-
ilton advised Washington that severe measures were im-
perative to teach the masses respect for law and order.
Though the Secretary's opponents replied that his allega-
tions were unfair, inaccurate, and deliberately planned to
strengthen the party in power by a demonstration of author-
ity, the President resolved upon military action. Calling
out a strong body of armed men and accompanied by
Hamilton, he himself started for the scene of disorder.
Before this display of power, the insurgents dispersed and
the myth of the rebellion exploded. A few men were ar-
rested and tried; two were convicted only to be pardoned
by the President; and an inquiry showed that the gravity
of their offense had been exaggerated. Instead of rais-
ing the prestige of the administration, the episode added
to the strength and pertinacity of the opposition. Jefferson,
whose long quarrel with Hamilton had culminated in his
resignation from the Department of State, took advan-
tage of the occasion to rally recruits around his agrarian
banner.

§

By this time the passiors aroused by domestic issues were
raised to white heat by dramatic events in the sphere of
foreign affairs. A terrible political storm—the French
Revolution and the wars let loose by it—was in progress
in Europe, leveling kings, princes, aristocracies, and clerical
orders, remaking the map of the Old World, and shaking
the foundations of all its social systems.

THE NATIONAL PARTIES G59

The curtain rose on this scene in the spring of 1789, only
a few days after Washington’s inauguration, when Louis
XVI, the French monarch, on the verge of bankruptcy as
a result of royal extravagance and expensive wars, includ-
ing the costly aid given to the Americans during their
struggle for independence, was compelled, after trying
many schemes to raise money, to appeal to the people for
help. In the hardest of circumstances, he summoned the
national parliament, or Estates General, to meet him at
Versailles, an action that had not been taken for more
than a hundred and fifty years; and amid great excitement,
the nobility, clergy, and commoners of France assembled
to hear what their king had to say and to say things to
him in reply—to ventilate their long-accumulating griev-
ances. Stirred by the thundering eloquence of Mirabeau in
the assembly hall, the representatives of the “third estate,”’
the bourgeoisie, brushed aside the nobility and clergy, re-
solved themselves into a national assembly, and started to
exercise sovereign powers in reforming abuses. ‘The
ancient dikes once broken, popular floods carried every-
thing before them.

So startling events followed in swift succession. On
July 14, the Bastille, a royal prison and symbol of abso-
lutism in Paris, was stormed and destroyed and its prisoners
freed. On the night of August 4, the feudal privileges of
the nobility, already dissolving in the lurid flames of burn-
ing chateaux, were formally surrendered in the national
assembly amid tumultuous applause. A few days later
the assembly announced the sovereignty of the people, pro-
claiming the privileges of citizens in a Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which immediately took its place beside
Jefferson’s great charter as one of the imperishable docu-
ments in the history of human liberty.

_ For two long years, one decree after another flowed from
the assembly hall, culminating in an elaborate constitution
for the kingdom of France which vested the legislative
power in a single chamber elected by popular vote. In the

360 THE RISE ‘OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

autumn of 1791 Louis XVI, frightened by mobs and dis-
covering no avenue of escape, accepted this crowning instru-
ment of revolution. As far as mortal man could see, France
had established, largely by peaceable means, a government
based on the consent of the governed. ‘The republic of the
United States seemed justified in the eyes of the democrats
of the Old World.

Nearly all American patriots rejoiced in what seemed to
be a fortunate application of the doctrines they had so
recently espoused. ‘Thomas Paine indulged in no mere
verbal flourish when he declared that “the principles of
America opened the Bastille.’ Certainly the French lib-
erals who had long criticized the evils of their old régime
had been encouraged by the American example to under-
take this thoroughgoing renovation. French officers and
soldiers, after serving in Washington’s army, had borne
home with them stories of the American experiment that
awakened a spirit of emulation. Young philosophers in
red-heeled shoes, fresh from the United States, had danced
at Louis’ court balls and chattered, half in jest and half in
earnest, about the superiority of republics over monarchies.
The queen, Marie Antoinette, had laughed with them over
the foibles of kings and courtiers and, by patronizing Frank-
lin, had given a certain vogue to dangerous republican
doctrines.

It was not without reason, therefore, that the citizens
of the United States viewed with pride the first stage of
the French Revolution as reflecting in some measure their
own political wisdom and progressive ideas. “In no part
of the globe,” wrote John Marshall, “was this revolution
hailed with more joy than in America.” ‘Those who had
misgivings concealed them. ‘‘Liberty,” exclaimed an over-
wrought Boston editor, in 1789, ‘‘will have another feather
in her cap. . . . [he ensuing winter will be the commence-
ment of a Golden Age.”’ Washington, to whom La Fayette
sent the key of the ruined Bastille, accepted it as a ‘‘token
of the victory gained by liberty.”

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 361

Almost at that very moment, however, rumors began to
reach the United States that the revolution, so auspiciously
opened, was turning into an ominous civil strife. Enraged
at the loss of their privileges and at the restraints imposed
by the new order, feudal lords and priests fled into Germany,
where they plotted to restore the old régime by an invasion
of France with German aid. Seeking help in throwing off
the shackles imposed on him by the national assembly,
Louis XVI, who had sanctioned the recent reforms with
vacillating reluctance, now opened negotiations with his
brother monarchs across the Rhine. In fact, even before
he approved the constitution which it drafted, he attempted
to escape from France and was foiled only because some
lynx-eyed subject discovered him at Varennes on his way
to the border.

While the monarchists were thus preparing a counter-
revolution, Paris workmen, denied the ballot by the as-
sembly which had declared the rights of man, held a
monster demonstration on the Champs de Mars in the
interest of more sweeping reforms, including manhood
suffrage. Ordered to disperse, they refused to obey, until
they were sent fleeing in every direction by armed forces
under La Fayette—a liberal advocate of constitutional gov-
ernment who had no sympathy for leveling democracy.
Thus in bloodshed a bitter contest opened between the
bourgeois, who had up to this point directed the course of
the revolution, and the populace of Paris bent on more
radical achievements.

Thereupon life flowed more swiftly and desperately in
France, violence rushing to the front of law and argument
as the legislative assembly, elected under the constitution
recently accepted by Louis XVI, managed by new men,
hurried from one action to another in breathless haste.
Charging the Austrian Emperor with conspiracy against
the reformed régime in France, it declared war on him,
adding a foreign conflict to civil discord, mingling the
tramp of marching men with the clamor of agitators. As in

362 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

every electric crisis, dynamic leaders now forged forward
to the direction of affairs, while a revolutionary party,
known as Jacobins because it held its first session in a
monastery of that order, wrested the helm from the feeble
hands of the moderates. In June, 1792, the palace of the
king was entered by a mob; in July, war was declared on
Prussia; in August Louis was deposed; in September, oc-
curred the first of the awful massacres: in which counter-
revolutionists, innocent and guilty, were put to death. In
January, of the following year, Louis XVI was borne to the
scaffold. In February, the circle of war was extended to
include England and then Spain. Proclaimed first as a bold
stroke of defense waged against monarchs determined to
destroy democracy, the armed struggle soon developed into
a campaign of aggression and conquest that raged for
almost twenty-two years with Bonaparte riding the whirl-
wind to a dictatorship under imperial symbols, meeting at
last his nemesis at Waterloo in 1815.

Before this fierce strife was far advanced, a grand na-
tional convention was elected and the government of France
passed into the hands of a small group of determined rad-
icals, known as the Committee of Public Safety. In every
branch, civil and military, extremists took possession of the
trappings of power. Resolved to stamp out monarchists,
they precipitated a reign of terror in Paris and a civil war
in the provinces. Violence answered violence, moving from
atrocity to atrocity with the merciless precision of nature.
And as the tide of domestic and foreign conflict flowed and
ebbed, one factional leader succeeded another in power—
Marat, Danton, Robespierre—with increasing passion until
the limit of human endurance was reached. ‘Then Bona-
parte in 1795 blew away the makers of revolution in “a
whiff of grape shot’ and gave France twenty years of
domestic ‘‘order’’ combined with exhausting foreign wars.

§

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 363

The echoes of this shattering conflict—economic, clerical,
and political—were heard around the world. Throughout
western civilization people were divided into factions ac-
cording to the nature of their reaction to the course of
French events. Across the Channel, in England, Edmund
Burke brought up his batteries of thundering oratory to
check the spread of French principles; in 1790, even before
any serious rioting had lifted its head in Paris, he pub-
lished his Reflections on the French Revolution, a terrific
indictment of the peaceful reconstruction that had been
wrought by the national assembly. In this powerful tract
he attacked everything that savored of democracy, denounc-
ing the very concept that the English people, for example,
had a right to choose their own rulers, frame a government
for themselves, or cashier their political authorities for mis-
conduct. The people of England, he said, utterly repudiate
the idea; nay, more, ‘“‘they will resist the practical assertion
of it with their lives and fortunes.”

Inflamed with wrath at the mere suggestion, Burke could
hardly find language hot enough to discharge his emotions
against the ‘‘frauds, impostures, violences, rapines, murders,
confiscations, compulsory paper currencies, and every de-
scription of tyranny and cruelty” which marked the drive
of the French Revolution. ‘Learning will be cast into the
mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”
Dignity, grace, refinement, and all that gives fragrance and
beauty to social life, he argued, will be ruined in order that
hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers may rule and ruin them-
selves and then set the world on fire. To stay this process
Burke called for war, relentless war, upon the French as
monsters and outlaws, demanding the restoration of the
genial and benevolent despotism of Louis XVI by English
arms. This first assault on French democracy he followed
by letters and brochures more and more furious and con-
vulsive until he fairly choked with unquenchable rage.

Though Burke’s writings made a furor in England, they
might have passed with little notice in America if Thomas

364 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Paine had not undertaken to counteract the campaign of
hatred that had been launched against France. But this
trenchant pamphleteer, whose appeals had stiffened the
backs of American Revolutionists and sent thrills through-
out the states in the dark days of the war for independence,
now seized his pen again, in order to answer Burke. Ina
few weeks he flung out to the world the first part of his
great apology for democracy—the Rights of Man; and an
edition given to the American public with a letter of ap-
proval from Jefferson was snapped up with avidity, fur-
nishing the theme of lively debates in taverns, coffee houses,
editorial sanctums, and drawing rooms.

‘From a small spark,” wrote Paine, ‘‘kindled in America,
a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished.”’ He admitted
that disorders had appeared in connection with the French
Revolution, but he asked the world to wait on the fullness
of time to gather the fruits of the work begun by the na-
tional assembly. In any event, Paine argued, man is deter-
mined to be free; he will institute his own forms of govern-
ment; monarchs, aristocracies, and priests cannot stay the
tide that rolls in along the shore. ‘‘Our people . . . love
what you write and read it with delight,”’ wrote Jefferson
to Paine. “The printers season every newspaper with ex-
tracts from your last, as they did from the first part of your
Rights of Man. ‘They have both served here to separate
the wheat from the chaff.”’ At a stirring moment in Ameri-
can politics, the pamphleteer had struck a note in perfect
tune with the passions of the men then engaged in fighting
a bitter campaign against Hamilton’s serried ranks of
the rich and well-born.

With incredible swiftness the Anti-Federalists organized
a network of democratic societies from one end cf the
United States to the other—using for their model the
French political clubs. To Federalists and old Tories it
seemed as if new committees of correspondence, such as
had engineered the revolution against George III, had
sprung into life again, with capacity for infinite mischief.

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 365

In all the cities and important towns meetings were held
to celebrate the victories of the radical parties in the French
Revolution; at a great banquet in Philadelphia hot-headed
orators openly exulted in the execution of Louis XVI;
everywhere in Anti-Federalist circles the coalition of
European monarchs against France—the cordon sanitaire
against democracy—was denounced as a union of despotism
against the principles upon which the American republic
was founded.

Applying the lessons to domestic politics, extremists de-
manded the completion of the leveling process in the United
States in accordance with French doctrines. Harmless
titles, such as Sir, The Honorable, and His Excellency, were
. decried as too aristocratic, and in the new language of
comradeship, it became the fashion to speak of Citizen
Jones, Citizen Judge, Citizeness Smith. In a kindred spirit,
excited democrats in Boston insisted on renaming Royal
Exchange Alley, Equality Lane; in New York, King Street
was rechristened Liberty Street. The President was praised
for walking occasionally about the streets like an ordinary
person; the Vice-President was criticized for riding in a
coach and six. ‘The rabble that followed on the heels of
Jack Cade,” exclaimed young John Quincy Adams, ‘‘could
not have devised greater absurdities than those practiced on
America in imitation of the French.”’ Beneath the surface
of the popular exuberance, there was a genuine sympathy
for the disfranchised artisans in the towns and for the
struggling farmers in the country. Poor men contending
against adversity saw, or thought they saw, in the success
of the French Revolution the final triumph of their faction
over “‘the enemies of the people.”’

Already deeply moved by domestic agitations, the Fed-
eralists became hysterical with fright when the extremists
came to the top in the swirling fortunes of Parisian politics.
They turned on the democratic societies in America as
angrily as Burke turned on English radicals, denouncing
them as sappers and miners engaged in destroying the

366 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Constitution. Without restraint, they abused everybody
who approved, or who passively refused to condemn with
suficient heat, the proceedings of the French Republic.
They applied the term ‘“‘Jacobin” profusely and indiscrim-
inately to all American citizens who sympathized with
France or who attacked the ‘“‘stock-jobbing squadron” at
home. Everything which the “rich and well-born”’ did not
like was damned in respectable circles as ‘‘Jacobinical.”

Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, stormed and raved.
‘Shall our sons,’’ he shouted, ‘‘become the disciples of
Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the
concubines of the Illuminati?’ With equal respect for
realities, another New England divine declared that Jeffer-
son and his partisans were spreading “‘the atheistical, an- .
archical, and in other respects immoral principles of the
French revolution.” In his anger he read them all out
of polite society: “The editors, patrons and abettors of
these vehicles of slander ought to be considered and treated
as enemies to their country. . . . Of all traitors they are
the most aggravatedly criminal; of all villains they are the
most infamous and detestable.”

A third Puritan clergyman, proposing to go beyond
verbiage, called for a war on France so that the Federalist
administration could destroy its critics at home—a simple
proposal for making traitors out of political opponents.
A fourth preacher of the gospel, who lamented the triumph
of French principles, thought the course of events especially
deplorable because “half a dozen legislators or even schol-
ars bred in New England and dispersed through the dif-
ferent countries of Europe every year” could have changed
“the political face of affairs” in the Old World. And now
the American radicals had spoiled everything by poisoning
the fountains of purity.

§

This pugilistic controversy over revolutionary politics
took on a fiercer aspect when American commercial inter-

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 367

ests became involved in the war between England and
France on the high seas; for facts as well as theories now
confronted the disputants. English naval commanders
seized American produce shipped in French vessels, cap-
tured American merchantmen carrying French goods, and
searched American ships in a quest for British-born sailors
to serve under the Union Jack. On the other side, the
French in their way were no gentler; they let loose a flood
of privateers, little better than pirates, to prey on American
commerce with England; if they did not impress American
sailors they often cruelly treated the officers and men who
fell into their hands.

When stories of these depredations seeped into the Amer-
ican press, party temper rose accordingly. The Federalists
could see every wrong committed by the French; the Anti-
Federalists every wrong committed by the English. And
things reached a climax when the French Republic called
upon the United States for help against England under the
old treaty of alliance and friendship made in 1778. Unques-
tionably the appeal touched a tender spot in America, where
the aid rendered to the American Republic in the dark days
of her own struggle against England was not forgotten.

But conservative men were at the helm and the times
called for discretion. Hamilton, hating French radicalism
in every fiber of his being, contended, with more dexterity
than logic, that the treaty had been made with the French
king and that, on the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy,
the obligations to France were suspended. Also bent on keep-
ing the country out of war at all costs, Washington brushed
aside Franklin’s famous document and in 1793 proclaimed
to the belligerents of Europe the neutrality of the United
States. Though Citizen Genét, the diplomatic representa-
tive of the French Republic, was greeted with extravagant
acclaim by the Anti-Federalists on his arrival in America,
Washington, refusing to be moved by popular clamor,
received the emissary with stern formality. When Genet,
angered by this treatment, issued manifestoes, held meet-

368 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ings, attempted to use American ports as bases of operation
for French privateers, and, with the aid of American parti-
sans, tried to unhorse Washington’s administration, the
President bluntly asked the French government to recall the
troublesome guest.

With this firm act Washington coupled a policy that aug-
mented the wrath of the opposition. While treating France
with frosty propriety, he showed a mild complaisance in
dealing with England. British troops still occupied forts
in the West; slaves and other property carried off by Brit-
ish soldiers during the American Revolution had not been
restored or paid for; and the British navy was playing
havoc with American commerce. Against these ‘‘wrongs,”’
Jefferson had often protested and on such counts some of
his followers, casting off all repressions in their resentment,
had repeatedly called for war on England.

On the other side, the Federalist party insisted on peace,
its leaders with their usual facility formulating arguments
in support of their policy. It was with difficulty, they said,
that Washington’s administration could raise funds for
current outlays and any extraordinary expenditure would
bring down in a crash the whole financial structure—the
funded debt and the Bank—so recently and so arduously
erected by Hamilton. Moreover, American towns were
thronged with English merchants; and English investors,
besides buying government bonds and bank stock, advanced
credit for trade and money for land speculation and indus-
trial enterprise, linking Hamilton’s party to the British
Empire by a thousand ties of a practical nature. Above and
beyond all these things, England was warring on radical
France, the detested principles of that republic, on the
doctrines of Jeffersonian democracy. Though the Federal-
ists lost heavily from the depredations on their commerce,
every consideration of economic interest and political cau-
tion commanded them to oppose a second war on King
George. In conformity to their wishes, Washington sent
the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, to Eng-

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 369

land to negotiate a new treaty disposing of the issues in
controversy.

Fully aware of the economic position and military weak-
ness of the United States, the British Government drove a
hard bargain with Jay. Its troops were to be withdrawn
from the Western forts for that cost no sacrifice and some
slight trading concessions were made; but nothing was said
about returning the slaves carried off by British soldiers,
about the seizure of American ships in the future, or about
the impressment of sailors. While England agreed to
pay for certain damages done at sea, Jay capitulated on
the matter of private debts due British creditors, thereby
reopening an old wound.

Many colonial patriots, in joining the revolutionary
movement of 1776, had hoped to sponge their accounts
with British traders and money lenders—a hope that never
died. Even though the treaty of peace which closed the
war for independence in 1783 had provided that no barriers
should be put in the way of collecting the old bills, a large
number of American debtors still managed to postpone the
day of judgment and discharge. Never dismayed by delay,
British creditors, on their part, continued to prod their rep-
resentatives at Westminster until finally they had their
reward in a clause of the Jay treaty, a clause binding the
government of the United States to compensate British
claimants for any losses due to impediments placed in the
way of collection by judicial process. When the reckoning
was made, it was disclosed that three-fourths of the total
amount was owed by citizens in the southern states. That
was the last straw: the slaves carried away by British sol-
diers were not to be returned and the hated debts were to
be paid—in the last extremity by federal taxation. Planters
who regarded with suspicion Jefferson’s French ideas were
now convinced that the Federalist party at least must be
ousted from power and the Jay treaty repudiated.

Jefferson himself denounced the agreement as an in-
famous alliance between the Anglo-men in the United States

370 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and England—a union made in defiance of the people and
the legislature. ‘The British minister in Philadelphia, now
temporarily the capital of the Republic, was openly insulted
by jeering crowds; Hamilton was stoned while attempting
to defend the treaty; and Jay was burned in effigy far and
wide amid howls of derision from enraged Republicans.
For a long time it was found impossible to enlist two-thirds
of the Senators in favor of ratification, and the fate of the
treaty hung in the balance.

At last, thoroughly alarmed by the peril of defeat, the
administration resolved to bring all its influence to bear.
Laying down his ledgers, Hamilton wrote a series of pow-
erful papers which he published anonymously. With in-
cisive rhetoric he stung indifferent Federalists to action,
warning them that “the horrid principles of Jacobinism”’
were abroad in the land and that a war with England would
throw the direction of affairs into the hands of men pro-
fessing these terrible doctrines. ‘‘The consequences of
this,’ he said, “even in imagination, are such as to make
any virtuous man shudder.” In the end, by dint of much
maneuvering and the use of personal influence, Washington
was able to wring from the Senate its approval of the treaty,
in June, 1795.

The deed was done but the ill-will aroused by it was not
allayed. To display its temper, the opposition in the House
of Representatives called upon the President for papers
pertaining to the negotiation of the treaty. When it was
curtly rebuffed, its wrath deepened, and the populace upon
which it relied for support was stirred to renewed opposi-
tion. By this time the Anti-Federalists, or Republicans, as
they were fond of calling themselves, strengthened by re-
cruits from many quarters, had grown into a fairly coherent
party and were evidently resolved upon grasping the
powers of the federal government at the coming national
election.

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 371

This state of affairs confirmed Washington in his deter-
mination to retire at the end of his second term. He would
then be sixty-five years of age and he was weary from his
burdensome labors in field and forum. Since the opening of
the Revolution, to say nothing of his provincial career, he
had spent nearly fifteen years in public service and even
while in retirement he had devoted irksome and anxious
months to the movement that produced the Constitution.
The glory of office had begun to pale. Once he had received
respectful homage on all occasions; now near the close of
his second administration he was shocked and grieved to
find himself spattered with the mud of political criticism.
Having definitely aligned himself with the Federalist group
and having assumed responsibility for the policies of admin-
istration framed by that party, he had voluntarily incurred
the risks of partisan attacks. Nevertheless he was dis-
tressed beyond measure to hear himself assailed, as he com-
plained, “‘in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could
scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even
to a common pickpocket.”

These were the circumstances that led him to take ad-
vantage of the first opportunity to return to the peace of
his Potomac estate. He had accepted reélection in 1792
only on the urgent solicitation of both Hamilton and Jef-
ferson, who had told him that he alone could save the new
fabric of government. But another election was out of
the question, not because he regarded the idea of a third
term as improper or open to serious objections; he was
simply through with the honors and turmoil of politics.
Accordingly, in September, 1796, on the eve of the presi-
dential election, he announced his decision in a Farewell
Address that is now among the treasured state papers of
the American nation.

In this note of affection and warning to his fellow cit-
izens, Washington directed their attention especially to
three subjects of vital interest. Having dimly sensed the
conflict impending between the North and the South,

372 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

he gravely cautioned them against sectional jealousies.
Having suffered from the excesses of factional strife, he
warned them against the extremes of partisanship, saying
that in popular governments it is a spirit not to be encour-
aged. Having observed the turbulent influence of foreign
affairs upon domestic politics, he put them on their guard
against ‘“permanent alliances with any portion of the for-
eign world,” against artificial entanglements with the vicissi-
tudes of European rivalries, against the insidious wiles of
alien intrigues.

Then in simple words of reconciliation he expressed the
hope that his country would forgive the mistakes which he
had committed during his forty-five years of public life and
that he might enjoy, in the midst of his countrymen, ‘‘the
benign influence of good laws under a free government—
the ever favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward,
as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors and dangers.”
Though many Anti-Federalists saw in the Address a veiled
attack upon their partisanship and their affection for
France, the more moderate elements in both parties re-
garded it as a message of sound advice from one whose
motives were pure and whose devotion to the public good
was beyond question.

Hearing that Washington was to retire, the opposition
cast off every lingering qualm. Until that moment all
save the most brutal critics had curbed somewhat the sweep
of their passions, even in denouncing the worst rascals who
took shelter behind the great President. At last he was to
go from the capital forever and ordinary mortals were to
hold the high office which he had filled with such superb
decorum. That opened the flood gates. With a show of
defiance, Anti-Federalists had branded the Hamiltonians as
monarchists and assumed for themselves the name Repub-
lican even if it savored of French excesses. Some of them
now ventured to call themselves Democrats—a term as
malodorous in the polite circles of Washington’s day as
Bolsheviki in the age of President Harding. Scorning the

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 373

Puritan clergy who called Jefferson an atheist and anarchist,
all the Anti-Federalists agreed that he was to be their leader
and their candidate for President at the coming election.

This challenge the Federalists accepted by nominating a
man of opposite opinions, John Adams of Massachusetts.
His views on popular government were well known: he had
openly declared that he feared the masses as much as he
did any monarch and that he favored “government by an
aristocracy of talents and wealth.” On the main point,
therefore, his theories were sound enough for any Federal-
ist; but Adams, even so, was not a strong candidate for a
boisterous campaign. While he had spoken contemptuously
enough of the crowd, he had poured no libations at the
feet of the aristocracy: in an elaborate work he had tried
to prove that in every political society there is a perpetual
conflict between the rich and the poor, each trying to despoil
the other, and that the business of statesmanship is to set
bounds for both the contending parties.

Besides being endowed with a somewhat reasoned sus-
picion of the high and the low, Adams was a student and
unfitted for the hustings. He was not an orator or a skillful
negotiator; his lightest word smelt of the lamp and his
friendliest gesture betrayed a note of irritation. It, there-
fore, required a desperate campaign to get him into the
presidency, with the narrow margin of three votes and, to
make the dose more unpalatable, since Jefferson stood
second in the poll, Adams found himself yoked for a four-
year term with his most redoubtable foe as Vice-President.

Relieved of his burdens, Washington now hurried away
from the capital to his haven at Mount Vernon, where
praise and affection followed him, yet not without taunts
from Republican champions who broke in upon the anthem
of gratitude from time to time. In fact, one of the critical
editors, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, flung after the
retiring President the burning words: “If ever there was
a period for rejoicing, this is the moment—every heart, in
unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought

374 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington
from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity
and to legalize corruption.” If such was the treatment ac-
corded to the great hero of the Revolution, Adams must
have been without hope of mercy. And he received none.

Only one measure of the Adams administration won
anything like universal approval and that was due mainly
to an accident of French politics. Resenting what it re-
garded as the pro-English policy of President Washington,
the Directory at Paris—the executive department estab-
lished under the constitution of 1795—treated the United
States with such lofty contempt that even the hottest de-
fender of France on this side of the Atlantic, as the news
was fed to him, felt insulted. Besides bluntly refusing to re-
ceive the American minister sent over in the closing days of
Washington’s administration, it persisted in believing that
the President’s Proclamation of Neutrality did not repre-
sent the real will of the United States. In addition to
ordering the confiscation of American vessels bound to and
from British ports or engaged in carrying British goods, it
permitted French privateers to play havoc with American
commerce in the West Indies. Now it was the turn of the
Federalists to shed their pacifism and shout for war on
“Tacobinical” France. But Adams, refusing to play that
game, kept his temper and instead of blustering sent a spe-
cial commission to France charged with the duty of restor-
ing friendly relations.

When the members of this mission arrived in Paris, they
found, so they reported, instead of a decent reception,
insolence and effrontery before their faces and intrigue
behind their backs. They were denied a formal recogni-
tion; but mysterious persons, pretending to speak for the
government, visited them after candlelight. Nowhere did
they see any signs of good will; on the contrary, according
to their accounts, the commissioners were confronted with
a demand for an apology from the American government
for its past conduct, a large loan, and handsome bribes for

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 375

French officials. After haggling for many months in a
vain hope for an accommodation, the mission broke off
negotiations and sent back dispatches containing a full state-
ment of its difficulties, perhaps not without political em-
bellishments. With a shrewd strategical flair, President
Adams immediately laid a report of the transaction before
Congress, referring to the Frenchmen who made these
demands for tribute and apology as Mr. X, Mr. Y, and
Mr. Z.

In the form in which the dose was administered by the
President, this was too much even for the stoutest Jacobin
in the United States. Some Republicans, it is true, stopped
to point out that the American minister sent by Washington
and rejected by the French Directory was openly known as
a bitter enemy of the French Revolution; others laid stress
on the conduct of the British navy toward which the Wash-
ington administration had shown so little resentment. But
the majority of Jeffersonians, much as they disliked Adams,
apparently forgot their French sympathies for the moment
and joined the Federalists in shouting: ‘Millions for de-
fense, not a cent for tribute!’’ Once more Washington was
called upon to take command of the army. Lively prep-
arations for combat were commenced and actual fighting
began on the high seas without any formal declaration
of war by Congress.

Nevertheless, desiring peace if it could be obtained
with decency, Adams renewed negotiations with France
amid cries of rage from Federalist fire-eaters. At this
juncture, Napoleon Bonaparte, after overthrowing the
Directory in Paris by a coup d état, installed himself
as First Consul and indicated willingness to make an ~
accommodation. The following year the two govern-
ments succeeded in reaching a kind of agreement that
saved their faces, if it did not remove the worst of the
irritants. By this time Adams was hopelessly adrift.
If -he had won some friends among Republicans by de-
clining to plunge into a war. against France, he had lost
supporters among Federalists, partly by his pacific spirit

376 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and partly by his failure to adjust some childish quarrels
that arose among officers over precedence in an army that
was to fight no battles.

While the Republicans were temporarily weakened by
the division of their forces over relations with France, the
Federalists resolved in 1798 to destroy the opposition,
if possible, with two drastic measures, famous in American
history as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The first of these
laws authorized the President, in case of war or a predatory
incursion, to prescribe the conditions under which alien
enemies could be expelled or imprisoned as the public safety
might require; thus Adams was given a weapon with which
to suppress the activities of the French agents and Irish
sympathizers who shared their antipathy for England. The
second act was even more severe in its terms; it prescribed
fine and imprisonment for persons who combined to oppose
any measure of the government, to impede the operation
of any law, or to intimidate any officer of the United States
in the discharge of his duty; it penalized everyone who —
uttered or published false, scandalous, and malicious senti-
ments tending to bring the government of the United States
or its officers into disrepute or to excite the hatred of the
people.

The Alien Act, although it was not enforced, gave great
offense, especially to the many foreigners in danger under
its provisions. ‘The Sedition Act was vigorously applied
and aroused a tempest. Several editors of Republican
papers soon found themselves in jail or broken by heavy
fines; bystanders at political meetings who made con-
temptuous remarks about Adams or his policies were hur-
ried off to court, lectured by irate Federalist judges, and
convicted of sedition. In vain did John Marshall urge
caution, explaining that the Sedition law was useless and
calculated to arouse rather than allay discontent. In vain
did Hamilton warn his colleagues: ‘‘Let us not establish a
tyranny. Energy is a very different thing from violence.”
The high and mighty directors in the party of “talents and

VHEGNATIONAL’ PARTIES Shi

wealth” would be satisfied with nothing short of destroying
their opponents.

As Marshall and Hamilton had foreseen, the resentment
of the Republicans answered persecution and finally burst
all bounds. They denounced the legislation as despotic and
its sponsors as tyrants. They invoked the protection of the
First Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly for-
bade Congress to make any law respecting freedom of
speech and press. ‘They appealed to the rights of citizens
and states.

Not content with the usual verbalism of politics, Jeffer-
son proposed something akin to defiance. He drafted a set
of resolutions declaring that the Alien and Sedition Acts
violated the Constitution and were therefore null and void
—resolutions which were introduced into the Kentucky leg-
islature, passed, signed by the governor, and proclaimed
to the country as representing the creed of the state. Simul-
taneously, Jefferson’s competent aide, James Madison,
started a similar revolt in Virginia, inducing the legislature
to adopt resolutions condemning the obnoxious legislation
and advising the states to codperate in defense of their
rights.

Though Kentucky and Virginia discovered that their ap-
peals encountered indifference or even opposition on the
part of their neighbors, they were not daunted. ‘The
former, hearing from some of the northern states that it
was the business of the Supreme Court to decide high ques-
tions of law, announced, in reply, the fateful doctrine that
a state could review acts of Congress itself and nullify any
measure it deemed unconstitutional. While the Virginia
legislature shrank from the full logic of this strong doc-
trine, it did appropriate money for arms and supplies.
Fortunately for the Republicans, the fourth presidential
election was now at hand and they could call upon the voters
to repudiate at the polls the authors of the Alien and Sedi-
tion Acts. The issue became a factor, at least a rhetorical
factor, in a nation-wide campaign. |

378 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
§

By unanimous consent leadership among the Republicans
went to Jefferson. After some study of Hamilton’s system
in operation, he had become an irreconcilable opponent of
all the leading measures fostered by the Secretary of the
Treasury. He had objected to the Bank on economic and
constitutional grounds. He had expressed critical opinions
about the administrations of Washington and Adams which
pleased the most radical among the agrarian faction.
Indeed, it was easy for him to satisfy the aspirations of that
party for, on matured conviction, Jefferson was primarily
a champion of agriculture. He sincerely believed that the
only secure basis of a republic was a body of free, land-
owning farmers, enjoying the fruits of their own toil, look-
ing to the sun in heaven and the labor of their own hands
for their support and their independence.

Like Aristotle two thousand years before and agricul-
tural philosophers through all the succeeding ages, Jefferson
distrusted the arts of commerce and industry, the arts of
buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.
These pursuits led inevitably, he thought, to chicanery, to
the accumulation of great wealth by speculation, intrigue,
and exploitation. For the artisans and laborers who served
the masters of commerce and industry in the crowded towns,
he had a great dislike, once going so far as to declare that
the mobs of great cities were sores on the body politic,
panders to vice, makers of revolution. As a corollary,
he was convinced that the American system of liberty would
come to an end when the people were congested in cities
and dependent for a livelihood upon the caprices of trade.
Such was his deliberate judgment formulated long before
the Constitution was framed or the fortunes of politics had
opened the presidency to him. This opinion was but hard-
ened by his experience at the national capital and the
ferocious treatment he had received from “the paper men”
whom he had so severely denounced.

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 379

Jefferson, however, was more than an avowed opponent
of Hamilton’s fiscal system and more than a convinced
champion of agriculture. He held views concerning human
nature and human progress which were abhorrent to those
who loved tranquillity in an established social system sus-
tained by dogmatic religious sanctions. In an age when
the masses of Europe were without education and were
regarded as an inferior order of human beings, Jefferson
declared his belief that ‘‘man was a rational animal, en-
dowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of
justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and
protected in right by moderate powers confided to persons
of his own choice and held to their duties by dependence on
his own will.’ While seasoned politicians of the Federalist
school were expressing contempt for theories of popular
rule, Jefferson was contending that men ‘habituated to
think for themselves and to follow reason as their guide”
could be more easily and safely governed than people
‘““debased by ignorance, indigence, and oppression.” With
him this was more than a formal faith. ‘I have sworn upon
the altar of God,” he wrote to a friend in 1800, ‘‘eternal
hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man.”’

The same spirit characterized his theories of education.
While a New England college president was proudly assur-
ing the public that Gibbon’s godless Decline and Fall of
Rome was not allowed in his institution of learning, Jeffer-
son was dreaming of a system of universal secular educa-
tion. In later life he realized a part of this lofty ideal in
the University of Virginia, founded under his leadership,
where he provided for a democratic scheme of self-gov-
ernment by the professors, rejected all religious tests for
teachers and pupils, exalted science, agriculture, and mod-
ern languages to a position of equality with the classics, and
relied for discipline on student honor. ‘The institution,”
he said at the time, ‘“‘will be based on the illimitable freedom
of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow

380 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the truth wherever it may lead or to tolerate any error so
long as reason is left free to combat it.”

For his religious ideas as for his political and educational
theories, Jefferson was hateful to the orthodox of every
sect. In common with so many philosophers of his age he
was a deist who regarded Jesus as a great teacher and a
good man. He applied higher criticism to the Bible, tested
its science in the light of reason, and expressed grave doubts
about the authenticity of its statements respecting creation,
the flood, and other points relative to the system of nature.
Though roundly denounced by theologians as an ‘‘atheist,”’
an epithet lacking both in accuracy and fairness, Jefferson
made no effort to conceal his liberality of opinion.

If reason was to be the guide in politics, religion, and
education it followed that freedom of press and speech
must be an essential element in the human scheme of things.
This theory Jefferson also carried to its logical conclusion;
utterly rejecting the tyrant’s plea that liberty can be best
protected by “beating down licentiousness,’’ he went the
whole length in asserting that the government should not
interfere with the expression of opinion until it merged
into an overt act. Even open resistance to government,
which logic forced him to face, was not so dreadful in his
eyes; when he heard of Shays’ uprising in Massachusetts,
he exclaimed: ‘God forbid that we should ever be for
twenty years without such a rebellion.”

§

In view of Jefferson’s doctrines it is not surprising that
consternation ran swiftly through the circles of wealth and
refinement in the middle and northern states when the
news of his election to the presidency was sent broadcast
in the autumn of 1800. Federalist ladies shook their wise
heads over teacups and shuddered with horror as they
spoke of the “‘atheist and leveler from Virginia.” Federal-
ist politicians and conservative gentlemen stood aghast:

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 381

all the grace and dignity of life, everything founded on
knowledge and morals seemed destroyed in a flash. ‘“Rea-
son, common sense, talents, and virtue,’ wrote one essayist,
‘cannot stand before democracy. Like a resistless flood,
it sweeps all away.” The end of all good things had come.
“Old Gates used to tell me in 1776,” wrote one of John
Jay’s friends, “that if the bantling Independence lived one
year, it would last to the age of Methuselah. Yet we have
lived to see it in its dotage, with all the maladies and im-
becilities of extreme old age.” A journalist who had passed
happily through the Revolutionary War bemoaned ‘‘the
spirit of innovation which has lately gained strength in
our borders, and now counteracts the best tendency of regu-
lar habits.”

The depth of Federalist consternation was exhibited in
an astounding proposal of Hamilton to prevent the triumph
of Jefferson by a measure of doubtful legality and still more
doubtful decency. In New York, where the presidential
electors were still chosen by the state legislature, the
election of the two houses in May, 1800, indicated that
Jefferson would be victorious in the autumn. ‘Therefore,
Hamilton proposed that the governor, John Jay, call the
old legislature in a special session to change the law and
provide for the choice of presidential electors by popular
vote in districts so arranged as to assure a majority for the
Federalist candidate. In making this suggestion, Hamil-
ton added that “scruples of delicacy and propriety” ought
to give way when one was faced with the task of preventing
‘an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting
possession of the helm of state.’’ ‘This extraordinary step
Hamilton thought justified by ‘‘unequivocal reasons of pub-
lic safety,” but Governor Jay was unmoved. With simple
directness, he wrote on the back of Hamilton’s letter these
words: ‘“‘Proposing a measure for party purposes, which it
would not become me to adopt.” By letting affairs take
their normal course, the honest governor assured the victory
of a man whose views he heartily disliked.

382 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

When the returns were all in after the autumn storm,
it was found that the Republican candidates, Jefferson and
Burr, had fairly defeated Adams and Pinckney, their Fed-
eralist rivals, but were themselves tied; each had received
the same number of electoral votes. Of course, everyone
understood that the Republicans wanted Jefferson for
President but, under the Constitution, the choice had to
be determined by the House of Representatives. Conse-
quently a momentary ray of hope gleamed through the
murky darkness of Federalist defeat. In making the de-
cision, the delegation of each state represented in the
House had just one vote and, under this provision of the
law, Federalists commanded a majority. They could
choose either Jefferson or Burr for President or they could
postpone the choice indefinitely.

As soon as word of the tie was confirmed, there opened
a fierce and sordid battle in the House over the selection
of the President. Finding that Burr’s sense of propriety
did not impel him to withdraw from the race, the Federal-
ists began negotiations with him and also with Jefferson
for the purpose of gaining from the candidate of their final
choice a promise to uphold, when elected, all the essential
points in the Hamiltonian program. At first many of
them were decidedly inclined toward Burr on general prin-
ciples—toward that wayward, spectacular, and mysterious —
grandson of Jonathan Edwards. For some strange reason
one of the Federalist leaders thought Burr ‘‘a matter-of-
fact”? man who held “‘no pernicious theories’ and justly
appreciated ‘“‘the benefits resulting from our commercial
and national systems.’’ Accordingly, Burr was duly
sounded but he would not give the requisite pledges.

In the meantime his deadly enemy, Hamilton, laying
aside his bitter hostility to Jefferson, threw himself into the
fray on the side of the Virginian candidate. While rumor
ascribes Hamilton’s hatred for Burr to rivalry for the affec-
tions of a woman, it was not necessary to add that hypothe-
sis to the incidents of political strife. Hamilton simply did

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 383

not share the views of his Federalist brothers; on the con-
trary he baldly branded Burr as a “‘Cataline.” He thought
that Jefferson was fanatical, unscrupulous, not very mindful
of the truth and indeed a contemptible hypocrite, but even
so more likely to temporize, bargain, and pursue a moderate
course than his colleague on the Republican ticket.

So Hamilton suggested that the rival, Jefferson, be
invited to give assurances with regard to the preservation
of “the actual fiscal system,” adherence to neutrality, and
the continuance of the Federalists in all save the highest
administrative positions. In the end, Jefferson was seen,
made known his views, and was chosen by the House over
Burr. By his action in the case, Hamilton added fuel to
the fire of enmity which culminated in his death three years
later at the hands of Burr in one of the most sensational
duels ever fought on American soil.

§

On account of nis commitments and the strength of the
Federalists in Congress, Jefferson had to proceed cautiously
after his inauguration; and yet he and his followers moved
steadily in the direction which they had mapped out during
the campaign of 1800. They had laughed at Adams’ coach
and six and at attempts of Americans to ape the ceremonials
of European courts. In keeping with their agrarian senti-
ments, Jefferson’s inauguration on March 4, 1801, the first
at the new capital in Washington, was marked by studied
simplicity. Republicans had thought that Washington’s
custom of reading his messages to Congress smacked of the
speech from the throne. Jefferson was no orator; so he
adopted the practice of sending his recommendations to
Congress by a clerk—a rule that was maintained unbroken
until 1913, when President Wilson returned to the example
set by Washington.

As if to emphasize his objections to official ritual, Jeffer-
son received the British Ambassador in untidy dress and

384 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

slippers worn at the heel. He did not, as is sometimes
averred, ride to the capitol on horseback, tie his horse to a
post, and walk up to take the oath of office; but this
apocryphal story illustrated the spirit of the new reign, ‘‘the
great revolution of 1800,” as Jefferson was fond of call-
ing it.

In the business of government, the Republicans, if not
intransigent, kept their thesis well in mind. ‘They had
denounced the funded debt as a means of creating a ‘‘money
power’’; they did not repudiate any part of it but they paid
it off as rapidly as they could. They had objected to the
excise tax, especially on whisky, and they quickly abolished
it amid the general rejoicing of the back-country farmers.
They had protested against the high cost of the federal
establishment and they reduced expenses by eliminating
many civil offices. They had held commerce in low esteem
and viewed the navy as a Federalist device for defending
it; in line with this theory they cut down the naval program.

In dealing with the distribution of federal offices, how-
ever, the Republicans proceeded with care even though
they found all good berths occupied by Federalist poli-
ticians. During the negotiations that preceded his elec-
tion Jefferson had, according to reports, agreed to deal
gently with the minor employees of the government; he had
also enunciated the noble sentiment that offices should be
open to all on the principle of merit alone. Consequently
he made no wholesale removals, but as vacancies occurred
from time to time he was careful to fill them with trusted
partisans as a matter of course. Believing that Hamil-
ton’s party had used the branches of the United States Bank
in building up its machine, Jefferson expressed himself
‘decidedly in favor of making all the banks Republican by
sharing deposits among them in proportion to the dis-
positions they show.’ In actual operation, therefore, he
discovered, as he remarked, that ‘‘what is practicable must
_ often control what is pure theory.” |
In keeping with Republican criticism of the sedition law,

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 385

Jefferson first proposed to declare it null and void in a
message to Congress but finally he just decided not to en-
force it against offenders arrested before the expiration of
the act on March 3, 1801, and to pardon prisoners then in
jail for violation of its provisions. Ultimately Congress
repaid most, if not all, the fines that had been collected
under the statute. The Republicans had been deeply of-
fended by the stump speeches delivered by Federalist
judges when instructing juries; and they promptly voted to
impeach Samuel Chase, a justice of the Supreme Court, who
had been especially severe in denouncing democratic doc-
trines from the bench. If they failed to convict him, it
was due to no lack of zeal in his prosecution; the Federal-
ists were simply too strong in the Senate where the trial
was held.

‘Though defeated in their effort to oust Chase from office,
the Republicans were able to get rid of the new district
judges appointed during the “midnight hours” of Adams’
administration; this they accomplished by the heroic process
of repealing the law creating the judgeships. In vain did
the Federalist Senators rave against this “‘assault upon the
judiciary,” declare that judges were entitled to a life tenure,
and cry out that the repeal of the law would bring the
Constitution down as a total wreck about them. The Re-
publicans had suffered much at the hands of Federalist
judges and they were in no mood to tolerate a single one
who could be ejected from power.

In expelling, reducing, abolishing, and repealing, the Re-
publicans were incidentally following the line of strict con-
struction but they made no particular point of the issue at
this time. They were willing to vote federal funds to
build a national highway into the West where Jefferson’s
free farmers were in need of help and were flocking to
the Republican standard. They were willing to buy the
Louisiana Territory, even though Jefferson believed the
purchase without constitutional warrant; for that expansion
of the Constitution and the country brought more land

386 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

on which to rear sturdy agrarians. Jefferson, a practical
man as well as a theorist, steered the ship of state by the
headlands, not by distant and fixed stars.

§

In their navigation, however, the Republicans, particu-
larly the local politicians of that school, had to reckon
with the Federalist interpretation of the Constitution by
John Marshall, who, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States, from 1801 to 1835, never failed to
exalt the doctrines of Hamilton above the claims of the
states. No difference of opinion about his political views
has ever led even his warmest opponents to deny his superb
abilities or his sincere devotion to the national concept. All
have likewise agreed that for talents, native and acquired,
he was an ornament to the humble democracy which brought
him forth. His whole career was American. Born on the
frontier of Virginia, reared in a log cabin, granted only the
barest rudiments of formal education supplemented by a
few months of law at William and Mary, inured to hard-
ship and rough surroundings, Marshall rose by masterly
efforts to the highest judicial honor America could bestow.

On him the bitter experience of the Revolution and of
later days made a lasting impression. He was no “summer
patriot.’’ He had been a soldier in the revolutionary army.
He had suffered with Washington at Valley Forge. He
had seen his comrades in arms starving and freezing because
the Continental Congress had neither the power nor the
inclination to force the states to do their full duty. To him
the Articles of Confederation had been from the first a
symbol of futility. Into the struggle over the formation of
the Constitution and its ratification in Virginia, he had
thrown himself with the ardor of a soldier. Later, as a
member of Congress, an envoy to France, and Secretary of
State, he had aided the Federalists in applying their prin-
ciples of government. When at length they were driven

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 387

from the executive and legislative branches of the govern-
ment, he was chosen for their last stronghold, the Supreme
Court. By historic irony, he administered the oath of office
to his bitterest enemy, Thomas Jefferson; and for a quarter
of a century after the author of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence retired to private life, the stern Chief Justice
continued to announce old Federalist rulings from the
Supreme Bench.

Marshall had been in his high post only two years when
he laid down for the first time in the name of the entire
Court the doctrine that the judges have the power to
declare an act of Congress null and void when in their
opinion it violates the Constitution. ‘This power was not
expressly conferred on the Court. ‘Though many able men
had held that the judicial branch of the government en-
joyed it, the principle was not positively established until
1803 when the case of Marbury vs. Madison, involving a
section of a federal statute, was decided.

In rendering the opinion of the Court, Marshall cited no
precedents, laid no foundations for his argument in ancient
lore. Rather did he rest it on the general character of
the American system. The Constitution, ran his premise,
is the supreme law of the land; it controls and binds all who
act in the name of the United States; it limits the powers
of Congress and defines the rights of citizens. If Congress
could ignore its limitations and trespass upon the privileges
of citizens, Marshall argued, then the Constitution would
disappear and Congress would become sovereign. Since
the Constitution must be and is from the nature of things
supreme over Congress, it is the duty of judges, under their
oath of office, to sustain it against measures which violate it.
Therefore, reasoning from the inherent structure of the
American constitutional system, the courts must declare null
and void all acts which are not authorized. “A law re-
pugnant to the Constitution,” he closed, “is void and the
courts as well as other departments are bound by that in-
strument.”’ From that day to this the practice of federal

388 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and state courts in passing upon the constitutionality of
laws has remained unshaken.

Yet at the moment this doctrine was received by Jefferson
and many of his followers with consternation. If the idea
was sound, he exclaimed, ‘“‘then indeed is our Constitution
a complete felo de se [legally, a suicide]. For, intending
to establish three departments, coordinate and independent,
that they might check and balance one another, it has given,
according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right
to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and
to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of
the nation. . . . The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is
a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which
they may twist and shape into any form they please. It
should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in poli-
tics, that whatever power in any government is independent,
is absolute also. . . . A judiciary independent of a king or
executive alone is a good thing; but independent of the will
of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican govern-
ment.’ But Marshall was mighty and his view prevailed,
though from time to time other men, clinging to Jefferson’s
opinion, likewise opposed judicial exercise of the high power
proclaimed in Marbury vs. Madison.

Had Marshall stopped with declaring unconstitutional
an act of Congress, he would have heard less criticism from
Republican quarters; but, with the same firmness, he set
aside important acts of state legislatures as well, whenever}
in his opinion, they violated the federal Constitution. In
1810, in the case of Fletcher vs. Peck, he annulled a law of
the Georgia legislature, informing the state that it was not
sovereign, but ‘“‘a part of a large empire . . . a member of
the American union; and that union has a Constitution

. which imposes limits to the legislatures of the several
states.”’ In the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, decided
in 1819, the Chief Justice declared void an act of the
Maryland legislature designed to paralyze the branches of
the United States Bank established in that state. In the

THE NATIONAL PARTIES 389

same year, in the still more memorable Dartmouth College
case, he abrogated an act of the New Hampshire legis-
lature which infringed upon the charter received by the
College from King George long before. That charter, he
asserted, was a contract between the state and the College,
which under the federal Constitution no legislature could
impair. [wo years later Marshall stirred the wrath of
Virginia by summoning her to the bar of the Supreme Court
to answer in a case involving the validity of one of her laws
and then justified his action in a powerful opinion rendered
in the case of Cohens vs. Virginia.

All these decisions aroused the legislatures of the states,
especially those in Republican control. They passed sheaves
of resolutions protesting and condemning; but Marshall
never turned and never stayed. ‘The Constitution of the
United States, he fairly thundered at them, is the supreme
law of the land; the Supreme Court is the proper tribunal
to pass finally upon the validity of the laws of the states;
and ‘‘those sovereignties,’ far from possessing the right
of review and nullification, are irrevocably bound by the
decisions of the Court. ‘This was strong medicine for the
authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and for
the members of the Hartford convention; but they had
to swallow it.

While restricting Congress in the Matthey case and the
state legislatures in a score of cases, Marshall also laid
the judicial foundation for a broad and liberal view of
the Constitution as opposed to narrow and strict con-
struction. In McCulloch vs. Maryland he construed gen-
erously the words “necessary and proper” in such a way
as to confer upon Congress a wide range of “implied pow-
ers” in addition to its express powers. Since the case
involved, among other things, the question whether the act
establishing the second United States Bank was authorized
by the Constitution, Marshall felt impelled to settle the
issue by a sweeping and affirmative opinion. Congress, he
argued, has large powers over taxation and the currency;

390 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a bank is of appropriate use in the exercise of its enumer-
ated powers; and therefore, though not absolutely neces-
sary, a bank is entirely proper and constitutional. ‘With
respect to the means by which the powers that the Con-
stitution confers are to be carried into execution,” he said,
Congress must be allowed the discretion which ‘‘will enable
that body to perform the high duties assigned to it, in the
manner most beneficial to the people.”’ In short, the Con-
stitution of the United States is not a strait-jacket but a
flexible instrument vesting in the national legislature full
authority to meet national problems as they arise. In
delivering this opinion Marshall used language almost
identical with that employed by Lincoln when, standing on
the battlefield of Gettysburg, he declared that “govern-
ment of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.”

CHAPTER EX

Agricultural Imperiaitsm and the Balance of
Power

thought that they could settle down in political power to

the enjoyment of peace, light taxes, and arcadian pleas-
ures, they were soon disillusioned. The agricultural interest,
which they so proudly represented, was no provincial estate
sufficient unto itself. On the contrary, it depended for its
prosperity upon the sale of its produce in the markets of
the Old World while its advance guard on the frontier
cherished imperial designs upon the neighboring dominions
of England and Spain.

Therefore American agriculture vibrated in its fortunes
with every turn in the European balance of power, never
more precisely than in the third year of Jefferson’s adminis-
tration when the fury of the Napoleonic tempest was again
unleashed across the sea. No theory of isolation could
protect it from the shock of a struggle for empire that
extended from London to Ceylon, from Moscow to Mexico
City, from Copenhagen to Cape Town, encircling the globe

89

[ the philosophical Jefferson and his official family

392 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with fire. America as well as Europe was set afloat.
Within a few years the Republicans in control of the federal
government, buffeted by gales from abroad and by passions
at home, were exercising powers greater than any ever
claimed by Hamilton and defending the constitutionality of
laws which they had once rejected. And in this swift
whirl of fact and philosophy, their opponents, the Federal-
ists, were forced into a narrow and crabbed provincialism
that made Jefferson’s juristic argument against the United
States Bank seem broad and generous in comparison.

It has long been the fashion of historians to cite this
reversal of fortunes in demonstrating the mutability of
human affairs and the hollowness of political professions.
Do not the items stand written clearly in the bond? ‘The
Republicans had proclaimed their unshakable faith in a
narrow interpretation of the Constitution; in 1803 they
purchased Louisiana—an act which Jefferson himself called
a violation of the supreme law; a few years later they in-
voked the power of regulating commerce to justify a
measure abolishing it and a ‘‘force bill” carrying that em-
bargo into effect. Celebrating the virtues of agriculture,
they had scorned the arts of trade; yet they vowed that
their war on Great Britain was made with a view to up-
holding American commercial rights upon the high seas.
They had opposed a national Bank and a protective tariff;
but, at the close of their experiment in war, they resorted
to both expedients in spite of their legal scruples.

And on the other side was the record of the Federalists.
They had proclaimed their steadfast faith in a liberal view
of the Constitution; but they could find no warrant in the
parchment for the Louisiana purchase or the embargo.
They had taken pride in cherishing the arts of trade; yet
they voted against the war on England which was supposed
to sustain the inviolability of American commerce. ‘The
reversal of politics, considered in terms of political rhetoric,
seemed to be absolute.

Considered, however, in economic terms, it was a re-

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 393

versal of means not ends. If the purchase of Louisiana
was unconstitutional, it at least added millions of acres of
rich farming lands to be developed by Jefterson’s beloved
“agricultural interest.” In the sphere of politics it also
meant, as the Federalists said, the overbalancing of “the
commercial states” by agricultural commonwealths. If in
form the war on England was declared for commercial
motives, it was in reality conceived primarily in the inter-
ests of agriculture.

This fact the scholarly researches of Julius W. Pratt
have demonstrated in a convincing fashion. Agriculture
just as shipping suffered from British depredations, for
American exports were, in the main, not manufactures but
the produce of farms and plantations. The men who voted
in 1812 for the declaration of war on England represented
the agrarian constituencies of the interior and their prime
object was the annexation of Florida and Canada. Hence
the opposition of the commercial sections to an armed con-
flict waged for the purpose of adding more farmers and
planters to the overbalancing majority was at bottom no
deep mystery.

Nor was the reversal of the Republican position on
finance shrouded in obscurity. The second United States
Bank, established by that party, did not grow out of a
desire to draw the banking fraternity to the support of the
government as in Hamilton’s time but in truth sprang from
a struggle to free the federal treasury from abject depend-
ence on eastern financial interests and rescue the currency
from the chaos created by the war. And finally, the pro-
tective tariff adopted by the Republicans in 1816 was de-
fended by the spokesman of the planting interest, John C.
Calhoun, on the ground that tariff schedules, when prop-
erly made, would provide a home market for cotton, corn,
and bacon. At that time New England banks, strong
enough to stand alone, welcomed no new rival in the hands
of Jeffersonian politicians; and New England capitalists,
largely engrossed in the carrying trade, did not look with

394 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

favor on customs duties that promised to cut it down. If
reference be had, therefore, to the substance of things de-
sired, some of the ambiguity of jurisprudence seems to be
removed and the continuity of economic forces once more
demonstrated.

§

The first great stroke of Republican policy in the sphere
of foreign relations, namely, westward expansion by the
purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803, was no bolt out
of the blue either for the planters and farmers of the West
or for Jefferson, who professed to cherish their interests.
A decade before that event there were hundreds of Ameri-
can pioneers in the Spanish territory beyond the Missis-
sippi; near the close of the eighteenth century the bishop of
Louisiana reported that “the Americans had scattered
themselves over the country almost as far as Texas and
corrupted the Indians and Creoles by the example of their
own restless and ambitious temper.’”’ Already promoters
in the West had their eyes fixed on Mexico and were blow-
ing up colorful dreams of imperial annexations to be real-
ized in that direction.

Already the war in Europe had forced the fate of the
West upon the attention of the federal government. The
first phase of that struggle had opened, as we have seen, in
1793, while Thomas Jefferson was still serving as Secretary
of State under President Washington, in a strategic post
of observation from which he discovered many things.
Especially did he grasp the meaning of the fact that, in
the general scramble for spoils among the powers of the
Old World, England might wrest Louisiana from the
feeble grasp of the Spanish monarch—a menace to the
United States to be avoided at all costs. Though he re-
tired from the State Department in 1793, Jefferson re-

tained his keen interest in the advancing frontier and con-
tinued to appreciate its importance.

During the intervening years until his inauguration as

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 395

President, events flowed swiftly in the regions beyond the
Alleghenies as a steady stream of settlers moved west-
ward with the sun. Kentucky was admitted to the Union
as a state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796, both of them
good agricultural communities that gave electoral votes to
Jefferson in 1800. Ohio, then rapidly filling up, was to
have a voice in the next presidential election. The whole
West was vibrant with prospects of great agricultural
enterprise and the leaders who directed affairs in the Mis-
sissippi Valley knew what they wanted. ‘They were unani-
mous in their resolve that the Mississippi must be kept open
to American trade all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; and
those with the largest imagination, as we have just said,
were prepared for imperial undertakings beyond the mighty
river. If Jefferson was inclined to hold back and deal
timidly with foreign powers, he could not escape the firm
pressure of his frontier constituents. In fact the very
existence of the western farmers and planters, to say noth-
ing of handsome earnings, depended upon the navigation of
the Mississippi without let or hindrance.

Down the river to New Orleans they floated their to-
bacco, corn, hemp, wheat, pork, and lumber for shipment
to the towns on the eastern seaboard or the markets of
the Old World. ‘To them this outlet to the sea was as
important as the harbor of Boston to the merchants of that
metropolis. For their bulky produce, transportation over
muddy roads across the mountain barrier was almost pro-
hibitive in its cost. ‘Tea, coffee, cloth, and nails might
come to them that way but, before the age of steamboats
and improved roads, farm produce had to find a less ex-
pensive and more practical route. Therefore, in their
search for a livelihood, in their quest for profitable enter-
prise, the men on the frontier were compelled to keep open
the port of New Orleans. Moreover, if their restless
spirit of migration was not to be quenched forever on the
east bank of the Mississippi, then their next march would
carry them beyond the borders of the existing American

396 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

dominion. By 1800 Kentucky had grown too civilized for
Daniel Boone; and signs of the onward surge were clearly
evident.

Accordingly, the frontiersmen watched with eagle eyes
the fortunes of the King of Spain to whom at the close
of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 had fallen the prize
of Louisiana. While he controlled New Orleans, there
was little to fear. No doubt he resented the constant
activity of Americans on the banks of the Mississippi; no
doubt he grew angry when he read in the reports of his
governors that these aggressive aliens looked greedily upon
his untilled lands; but he was powerless to hold them in
check.

While the outward signs of his immense empire were
still imposing, a frightful palsy afflicted it from the center
to the circumference. The valor, the energy, the ca-
pacity for great undertakings, which in the sixteenth century
had made the name of Spain feared throughout Europe
and around the world, had departed, leaving infirmity and
incompetence supreme at Madrid and in the provinces.
So in 1795 when Washington pressed the Spanish sov-
ereign for a treaty granting Americans the right of trade
through New Orleans, he won that privilege with rela-
tive ease. When five years later Napoleon covertly de-
manded the return of Louisiana to France, there was no
alternative but secret compliance.

In the summer of 1802 a crisis was precipitated: a royal
order from Spain in July closed the port of New Orleans
to American produce. Hard on the heels of this news
came a confirmation of the rumor that Napoleon had really
wrested Louisiana from Spain. At any time, therefore,
the French flag might be raised on the American border;
for a temporary lull in the European War—effected by
the treaty of Amiens signed in the spring of that year—
promised the Corsican an opportunity to tempt fortune
next in the New World. Ina few months “the scalers of
the Alps and the conquerors of Venice’ might appear in

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM SOF

New Orleans, Natchez, and St. Louis. ‘Their capacity for
action was notorious.

Immediately the West was ablaze with excitement
and alarm. Immediately a turbulent call to arms re-
sounded along the frontier; expeditions were organ-
ized to prevent the landing of French troops; the legis-
lators of Kentucky passed resolutions of protest against
‘invasion,’ pledging their lives and fortunes to sustain
their rights; petitions for immediate aid flooded in
upon the philosopher in the White House. Whatever his
inclination, Jefferson was thus made aware that willful
and irascible leaders in the West would open New Orleans
by force if the federal government could not open it by
negotiation.

If Jefferson’s natural love of tranquillity and his affec-
tion for a strict construction of the Constitution had been
ten times as great, the clamor of the West would have
compelled him to act. He knew a political storm when
he saw it on the horizon; so he urged his ebullient frontier
constituents to restrain their ardor until he could try the
resources of diplomacy.

Then he set the machinery in motion at Paris, thinking
all the time of the produce dammed up at New Orleans
rather than of the expansion of America in the abstract.
The crisis, he evidently thought, was to be considered in
terms of corn, tobacco, and bacon. ‘‘The cession of
Louisiana and the Floridas by Spain to France,” he wrote
to Livingston, the American minister in Paris, ‘works
sorely in the United States. It completely reverses all the
political relations of the United States and will form a new
epoch in our political course. . . . There is on the globe
one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and
habitual enemy. It is New Orleans through which the
‘produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to mar-
ket.” Spain might have retained it in her weakening
hands for years, he went on to say, but the occupation of
New Orleans by France would be a menace that could not

398 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

be ignored. ‘Thus driven by realities Jefferson instructed
Livingston to sound Napoleon on the possibility of buying
New Orleans and also the Florida territory east of the
Mississippi—on the assumption that the latter had gone
to France with the Louisiana region.

To fortify Livingston and emphasize the urgency of
action, Jefferson sent James Monroe to France with in-
structions to help make a treaty that would enlarge and
secure American rights and interests on the Mississippi
and “‘the territories eastward thereof.’ But before Mon-
roe arrived in Paris, events had already begun to move
with high speed. A French expedition to subjugate rebel-
lious Santo Domingo had met disaster, warning Napoleon
against adventures in the New World. Moreover, he had
decided to renew the European war and needed to hus-
band all his resources. Fully conscious that he had no
fleet capable of coping with England, he knew that the loss
of Louisiana in the impending conflict was as certain as
fate.

With characteristic abruptness, Napoleon decided to sell
to the United States every inch of the territory so recently
wrung from Spain and instructed his minister of foreign
affairs to open negotiations for that purpose. A few hours
later Livingston was suddenly confronted by the astounding
offer of the whole Louisiana domain. For a moment he
was bewildered because he had no orders authorizing him
to buy an empire; but his courage being equal to the occa-
sion, he accepted the proposal. Monroe, who appeared on
the scene at this moment, added his approval; and on April
30, 1803, the treaty of cession was signed by the nego-
tiators. According to its terms, the Louisiana Territory, as
received from Spain, was to be transferred to the United
States in return for $11,250,000 in six per cent bonds plus
the discharge of certain claims held by American citizens
against F'rance—a purchase price amounting to $15,000,-
000 in all. When the deed was done Livingston exclaimed
that the action would in time transform vast solitudes into

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 399

flourishing communities, reduce England from her still
dominant position in American affairs, and give the United
States a position of first rank among the great powers of
the earth.

Spain protested passionately and the French newspapers
stormed. Napoleon’s brothers, Lucien and Joseph, called
on him to remonstrate. According to one story, they found
him in his bath but insisted on seeing him at once to present
their objections to the sale. Angered by their intrusion,
Napoleon rose in haste, berated them for their insolence,
and drenched them with water as he plunged back into
his tub. When Lucien, not yet subdued, lingered to voice
his opposition to the disposal of so fair a province, the
First Consul, with an impatient gesture, flung his snuff box
to the floor, declaring he would break his own brother in
the same fashion if his opposition continued. In France
the issue was closed.

When the news crossed the Atlantic the people of the
United States were aroused in their turn—no one more
astounded than Jefferson. He had thought of buying New
Orleans and West Florida for a small sum but an empire
had been dumped at his feet at a staggering price. He had
cried aloud against the immense national debt amassed by
Hamilton and had instructed Gallatin, his own Secretary
of the Treasury, to bend every effort to reduce it; now he
was asked to add fifteen million dollars to the burden him-
self at one stroke. He had pledged himself to abide by
the letter of the Constitution and he could find no word in
it expressly authorizing the government of the United
States to buy a square foot of land.

His first thought being for ceremonial correctness, Jef-
ferson prepared an amendment to the Constitution which
would authorize the purchase. But delay was dangerous
and changing the fundamental law of the land was a slow
process. So under the stress of necessity Jefferson aban-
doned that project and simply called upon the Senate to
ratify the treaty of cession. Exercising a keener vision

400 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

than they had shown a few years before, his friends now dis-
covered authority for that action in the treaty-making clause
and in other corners of the nation’s supreme law.

Delighted to receive a legal sanction, Jefferson acquiesced
on the point of theory, saying that “‘the good sense of our
country will correct the evil of construction when it shall
produce evil effects.’ Thus from slavish adherence to the
letter of the covenant, he passed to dependence upon the
nebulous ‘“‘good sense’”’ of his fellow citizens at large. Ap-
parently. troubled in conscience, however, he wrote to a
friend that the government was like an agent who had ex-
ceeded his authority and must throw itself on the mercy
of the country knowing that the people would have taken
the step if they had been given a chance to do it. In other
words, the government could alter the Constitution in
a pinch when convinced that the people would have it so.
John Marshall doubtless felt competent to amend it him-
self but he never committed any such doctrine to black
and white.

Now it was the turn of the Federalists to appear in the
role of pinchbeck lawyers and economists. They could
find no constitutional warrant for the purchase, no need
for such a vast territory, no money with which to pay for
it. Manufacturers of Pennsylvania and merchants of New
England could see no reason for their being excited about
the plight of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In fact they
feared the growth of the West for they did not want to be
outvoted in Congress by farmers from the frontier; they
were also offended by rough voices and deficiencies in table
etiquette at White House functions. The better educated
the Federalists were, it seems, the less they understood
the destiny of America. Sons of Federalist fathers at
Williams College, after a solemn debate, voted fifteen to
one that the purchase of Louisiana was undesirable. Like
their sires, they faced the sea. The streets of London, the
quays of Lisbon, and the Hong of Canton were more
familiar sights to the merchants of the coast than were

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 401

the somber forests and stump-studded clearings of western
America.

Wheeling up all their batteries of argument, the Federal-
ists in the Senate raged against the ratification of the treaty
of purchase. Men who had easily found Hamilton’s Bank
constitutional could not discover in the fundamental law
of the land any vestige of warrant for acquiring more ter-
ritory. Men who thought that the “broad back of Amer-
ica’’ could bear Hamilton’s consolidated debt at six per
cent interest now went into agonies over a new bond issue
of less than one-fifth the sum at the same rate of in-
terest. They drew doleful pictures as they counted the
mass of gold and silver which would be wrung from the
people to pay for a wilderness. ‘They pointed out by way
of contrast the low price which William Penn had paid for
his princely domain. Finally and more directly to the
point, they complained that the purchase of Louisiana
would break the authority enjoyed by the old and con-
servative eastern states, shift the balance of political power
to the West, and transfer the government of the Union to
horny-handed farmers of leveling tendencies. They al-
most visualized the coming invasion of Andrew Jackson’s
hordes.

Yet the eloquence of the Federalists could not defeat the
treaty. Jefferson commanded the votes and it was ratified.
“The grand old republic is lost,’’ mourned the die-hards,
as they turned to their journals and ledgers. . In December,
1803, the Stars and Stripes were raised over the government
buildings in New Orleans; the land of Coronado, de Soto,
Marquette, and La Salle passed under the sovereignty of
the United States.

How large was the acquisition no one knew, for the
boundaries had never been actually defined. When Living-
ston asked the French minister a question on that point, he
received an evasive answer; neither the minister nor any-
one else could furnish an accurate map. It 1s safe to say,
however, that Louisiana embraced all the territory at pres-

402 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ent within the borders of Arkansas, Missouri, lowa, Okla-
homa, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, besides large
portions of what is now Louisiana, Minnesota, North Da-
kota, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. ‘The farm lands
which the ‘“‘little-America” party on the seacoast called ‘“‘a
worthless wilderness” were well settled within less than a
century and valued at seven billion dollars—five hundred
times the price paid to Napoleon for them.

§

The same fateful course of events in Europe, beyond
the will and the purpose of Jefferson, that lifted him from
his narrow view of the Constitution to the wide national-
ism of the Louisiana Purchase, drew him and his immedi-
ate followers into domestic policies more autocratic and
sweeping than Hamilton’s boldest enterprise; hurried them,
pacific as they were in intention, into a struggle not of their
own deliberate making; compelled them to resort to hated
measures of revenue and finance; and, to cap the climax,
thrust their opponents, the Federalists, out into utter dark-
ness, far beyond the confines described in the Kentucky Res-
olutions and near to the border of secession and rebellion.
Those who had set sail to the North Pole suddenly found
themselves below the Antarctic circle. All this flowed in-
exorably from the reopening of the Napoleonic wars in
1803 and the steady advance of the American frontier south
and west.

The world-encircling conflict, begun in 1793, now entered
upon its last phase, as England and France plunged into a
death struggle for supremacy in two hemispheres. The
true nature of the armed contest had at last become appar-
ent. The French Revolution had run its course from
moderate reform to radicalism; from Marat’s radicalism to
Bonaparte’s despotism. After grasping the scepter of
power, Napoleon—who was infinitely more efficient than
any of the Bourbons that ever ruled France—undertook to

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 403

recover from the ancient foe some of the commerce and
territory lost in previous wars and make himself arbiter of
Europe.

In the accomplishment of his purposes, he annexed Bel-
gium and Holland, assumed the imperial crown, placed his
brother, Joseph, on the throne of Spain, brought Italy
under his heel, broke the Prussian sword which Frederick
the Great had wielded with such effect at Rossbach and
Leuthen, created a Rhine Confederation of German states
under his own hegemony, humiliated the Pope, and brought
the Tsar of all the Russias to his feet. While trampling
on Europe, Napoleon attempted to paralyze the lucrative
trade of Great Britain and strike a mortal blow at her
Indian empire; but it was this undertaking that proved his
ruin. Naturally the ruling classes of England were fright-
ened into desperation. Besides fearing that the leaven of
Jacobin doctrines would sooner or later produce a revolu-
tion in London, they were in mortal terror lest the vic-
torious arms of Napoleon should wrest from them the
fairest parts of their overseas dominion.

So the law of the jungle prevailed; and in the frightful
contest that followed, the rights of neutrals were as chaff
before a hurricane. Unable to form a coalition strong —
enough to beat Napoleon on land, England undertook to
starve him and his allies into submission by the control of
the sea. In May, 1806, she declared the coast of Europe
blockaded from Brest to the mouth of the Elbe. In No-
vember of that year, Napoleon retaliated with his Berlin
decree proclaiming a blockade against the British Isles, al-
though he had no navy to enforce it. Within a twelve-
month England countered with a stiffer ukase—Orders in
Council requiring American ships bound for the barred zone
to stop first at a British port, secure a license, and pay a
tax. his, exclaimed Napoleon, was the height of insol-
ence and he replied with his Milan decree announcing that
he would seize and confiscate any ship whose master obeyed
the recent commands of Great Britain.

404 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The predicament of American commercial interests was
now extreme. A ship that sailed directly for the Conti-
nent was liable to seizure by the British; a ship that cleared
for Great Britain might fall into the hands of the French.
An American captain, who sought safety by entering a Brit-
ish port and paying the license fee, lost his cargo and his
vessel if Napoleon’s watchful officers found him out. And
yet, though the risks were great, the rewards of escape were
commensurate with the hazards. If one ship out of three
wriggled through the net, the profits of the lucky stroke
paid the losses and good dividends besides. So American
merchants and seamen, who counted as nothing a trip
around the Horn to China by way of San Francisco and
Honolulu, crowded the little Atlantic with their boats.
Steadily their tonnage engaged in foreign trade rose in
spite of the appalling ravages wrought by the European
belligerents, the violations of neutral rights, and the ter-
rible insults to American pride.

In matters of principle there was slight difference be-
tween England and France; if the former seized more
American ships, it was due to main strength, not to any
tenderness on the part of Napoleon’s watchmen. ‘There
was one respect, however, in which England was the greater
offender and that, too, was due to circumstance rather than
discrimination. She was in dire need of sailors for her
navy. Her sea captains gave their men filthy food, flogged
them half to death for trivial causes, and herded them into
quarters unfit for human beings, the mutiny of the Nore,
in 1797, bearing testimony to such gruesome practices.
Consequently, droves of British sailors fled to American
ships in search of oetter treatment, to earn higher wages
and escape the war.

Thus it often happened that an American vessel carried
among its crew men whose service could be lawfully claimed
by England. But in many cases, it was difficult to tell
whether a sailor was an Englishman or an American, espe-
cially since the citizens of both countries spoke the same

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 405

tongue. In fact nothing except official records could deter-
mine the nationality of a seaman and frequently that rover
on the wide ocean had no authentic document showing the
land of his rightful allegiance. Moreover, American nat-
uralization papers were not accepted by England. Adher-
ing to the ancient rule, “Once an Englishman always an
Englishman,” she steadily refused to recognize the prin-
ciple of expatriation.

Evidently there were in these conditions good and sufhi-
cient grounds for wordy quarrels and acts of hostility.
The government of the United States denied the right of
British captains to hold up and search American ships at
their sweet will. Even’ if carried out with all possible
courtesy, the process itself was distressing beyond endur-
ance. The operation required an American ship, when-
ever ordered, to ‘‘heave to,’’ and remain submissive under
British guns while the searching party pried into records,
grilled the captain and his crew, seized, handcuffed, and
carried off expostulating sailors. In making inquisitions
English captains were not always nice in their judgment;
in some instances they dragged away, in irons, men born
under the American flag. Saints could not have done this
work without arousing anger and saints could not have
undergone the humiliation without reaching the limits of
forbearance.

In point of fact, seamen of that age were not noted
for the suavity of their manners; while searching and seiz-
ing they did not always observe the amenities of the draw-
ing room. When, for example, in the summer of 1807
the American frigate, Chesapeake, refused to surrender
some sailors alleged to be deserters from King George’s
navy, the British warship, Leopard, opened fire, killing
three men and wounding eighteen—a high-handed act which
even the British ministry did not have the hardihood to
defend. Besides doing as they pleased on the high seas,
the belligerents were none too fastidious in American
waters. Both British and French ships patrolled the coasts

406 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of the United States and pursued their prey within the
three-mile limit. If the French did less damage and in-
flicted fewer insults, it was due to lack of power and oppor-
tunity, not to any high regard for jurisprudence and
esthetics, as their dictatorial conduct in other respects well
proved.

The campaign of violence on the seas was accompanied
by an angry exchange of notes and opinions among the
powers involved. In this sphere neither the English nor
the French government was over-refined in its methods.
The former paid little attention to American protests and,
when it deigned to reply at all, often used the language of
irony conceived in contempt. Napoleon, on his part, ac-
cused Jefferson of accepting without a blow subjection to
the British Empire, issued false statements, and made prom-
ises which he did not intend to fulfill. To add to the com-
plexity of the endless diplomatic parley, American con-
gressmen entered into curious relations with British and
French representatives—relations that were wanting in
taste if not in loyalty.

Stories of these transactions, coupled with reports of
atrocities on the high seas, spread controversy and alarm
throughout the United States, causing the partisan spirit to
flame high. Some citizens wanted to fight England; some
wanted to fight France; others wanted peace at any price.
True to political forms, Federalist Senators and Repre-
sentatives, goaded by constituents who had lost ships and
cargoes at sea and at the same time bent on political advan-
tages for themselves, resorted to every measure which in-
trigue and ingenuity could invent to embarrass and discomfit
Jefferson in his baffling search for a way out of the dilemma.
_ Whatever could be said of the President’s diplomacy
amid these perplexities, one thing was certain: he was eager
to keep his nation out of the European quarrel and he man-
aged to do it for six years—as long as he was in power.
In maintaining this resolute stand against war, Jefferson
coolly followed a policy which he had matured on the basis

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 407

of long experience and wide study. Peace was with him
not only a “‘passion,” as he said; it was a system.

Although by no means a universal pacifist, he was fully
convinced that peace was the best policy for the United
States, given its geographical position, its democratic in-
stitutions, and its agricultural character, insisting with
Washington that the age-old battles of Europe were no
concern of America. He was not afraid of bloodshed or
inherent evils of war; it was the social results of armed
conflicts he dreaded. War, he exclaimed, had transformed
the kings of Europe into maniacs and the countries of
Europe into madhouses while peace had “saved to the
world the only plant of free and rational government now
existing in it!’? Corruption and tyranny, in his opinion,
flowed from armed conflicts, whereas ‘‘peace, prosperity,
liberty and morals have an intimate connection.” ‘There-
fore, he reasoned, all but “pepper-pot politicians’ would
hold him in high esteem for keeping the country aloof from
a brutal struggle “which prostrated the honor, power, in-
dependence, laws, and property of every country on the
other side of the Atlantic.” In spite of all criticism, it
was thus a reasoned and deep-seated conviction—not im-
pulse or caprice—that led Jefferson to keep ever before him
the goal of peace during the negotiations and agitations that
made his administration so tumultuous.

Seeking with all his talents a solution of the problem in
measures short of war, the President resorted at the out-
set to diplomatic negotiations. Finding that requests and
pleas had no material effect on the belligerents, he under-
took to bring them to terms by restraining their commerce
and cutting off their supplies. When Great Britain block-
aded the Continent in 1806, the immediate answer of
Jefferson and his party was the Non-importation Act clos-
ing American ports to certain British goods—an instru-
ment intended to serve, figurately speaking, as a club over
the head of King George’s ministry.

But this law proved to be an idle gesture; British and

408 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

French restrictions on American trade became more oner-
ous. Therefore Congress passed in December, 1807, the
Embargo Act, which forbade all American vessels to leave
these shores for European ports. In this fashion a clause
of the Constitution authorizing the regulation of foreign
commerce was stretched to sanction a measure abolishing
it. Though a caustic remedy, this act was equally without
avail in bringing European powers to terms; and, after
applying it for two disastrous years, Congress, in the clos-
ing days of Jefferson’s administration, repealed the futile
and irksome measure, substituting for it the Non-inter-
course Act, which prohibited trade with England and France
while permitting it again with the rest of Europe—another
arbitrary law which, like the others, pagans no relief from
the exactions of the belligerents.

Indeed, the Embargo Act was more destructive to busi-
ness and agriculture than the English and French depreda-
tions on sea-going ships. Before the passage of that law,
bold seamen, lured by high profits, took the risks involved
and carried cargo after cargo safely into foreign ports.
There were sport and speculation as well as danger and loss
in the adventure. Men who cursed Jefferson for failing to
break the Orders in Council and the Napoleonic decrees
could work off some of their frenzy in the excitement of
blockade-running.

But when the Embargo bill was passed, the brave were
tied up in port with the timid. Ships then swung idly at
the docks. Goods decayed in warehouses. Merchants
were driven into bankruptcy; bookkeepers, shipbuilders,
longshoremen, and sailors were thrown out of employment.
Farmers and planters of the South and West found the
export market for their cotton, rice, tobacco, corn, and pork
paralyzed, while the prices of manufactures doubled.

In short, those who obeyed the law were impoverished;
those who violated it by slipping out of the harbors or by
smuggling goods into Canada or Florida for shipment
abroad were liable to be ruined by encountering the agents

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 409

of the federal government at any moment. The country
at large, angry and impotent, broke into furious wrangling,
with editors raging and Federalist politicians fuming. Jef-
ferson himself was heartily sick of the whole business.
“Never,” he groaned, on the expiration of his last term,
‘did a prisoner released from his chains feel such relief as
I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature in-
tended me for the more tranquil pursuits of science by ren-
dering them my supreme delight.”

§

When Jefferson declined reélection and thus made the
third-term doctrine a part of the unwritten Constitution,
the presidency devolved upon James Madison, also a man
of peace. As the Secretary of State, Madison had for
eight years consistently sustained the Jeffersonian policies
as a matter of loyalty and conviction. In fact, his whole
career had been pacific. Though active in public affairs
during the Revolution, he had served in legislative halls and
council chambers, not on the field of battle. Small in
stature, studious in habits, sensitive in feeling, he was in
the bottom of his heart a lover of peace and, if he had been
master of his party after the fashion of Jefferson, Congress
might not have taken up arms in 1812. But Madison
was not a commanding personality and the drift toward war
became steadily more marked as the months of his adminis-
tration rolled on.

Searches, seizures, captures, impressments, and collisions
continued to agitate the country and deepen resentment.
In the spring of 1811, a British frigate held up an Ameri-
can ship near the harbor of New York and ‘“‘took from her
John Diggio, an apprentice to the master of the brig and
a native of Maine.” While cruising under orders from
the Secretary of the Navy to prevent such outrages, Com-
modore John Rodgers, commanding the frigate, President,
came to blows with the British sloop Little Belt, smashed

410 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

her upper works, and killed several of her seamen. If
the country had been hunting a pretext for taking up arms
against England in defense of commercial rights, it could
easily have found one.

As a matter of fact, the rising tide of opinion which
bore Congress along in the direction of war did not flow
primarily from the commercial sections of the country. It
is true that one branch of American mythology represents
the second war with England as springing inevitably from
her depredations on American trade and her impressment
of American seamen, but the evidence in the case does not
exactly support that view. Northern shipowners, upon
whom the losses fell with special weight, did not ask for
armed intervention. On the contrary, they took great pains
to prove that the federal government’s report listing thou-
sands of impressment outrages was false and they were
almost unanimous in their opposition to drawing the sword
against England. Moreover, it must be remembered that
two days after the United States declared war—before
news of the event reached London—the British government
withdrew its obnoxious Orders in Council, leaving only the
impressment issue unsettled by parleys and diplomacy.
If, as had been said, that alone was sufficient cause for
war, the fact remained that the communities which suf-
fered most from it did not so regard the matter.

It was in other quarters, as Pratt has conclusively shown
in his Expansionists of 1812, that the war fever was rising.
All along the frontier from Vermont to Kentucky, advanc-
ing pioneers were ready for a new onward surge. West-
ern New York and the Ohio country were filling up with
settlers and the call for more virgin soil was being heard
in the land. Fully understanding the significance of this
demand the Indians, with unerring instinct, turned to the
British for help—and received it. Since Canada was still
sparsely settled and the western region practically given
up to the fur-trading interests, the Indians and British
could, without any difficulty, make a common cause against

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 411

Americans, both being eager to preserve against the on-
coming pioneer the hunting grounds that were the haunts
of fur-bearing animals.

In these circumstances, whole tribes of Indians on both
sides of the boundary between the United States and Can-
ada—one estimate placing the number at sixty thousand—
came under British influence and were ready at any signal
to fall upon American outposts with fire and tomahawk.
It was to this factor in the diplomatic game that Henry
Clay referred when he called for the acquisition of Canada
in a war on England, exclaiming: “Is it nothing to us to
extinguish the torch that lights up savage warfare? Is
it nothing to acquire the entire fur trade connected with that
country and to destroy the temptation and opportunity of
violating your revenue and other laws?”

Besides getting rid of the Indian barrier to the advance
of the agricultural frontier, besides gathering in the rich
fur trade enjoyed by the British, the American war party
also hoped to acquire the farming lands of Canada. When
in 1811 the delicate matter of relations with England was
being debated in the House of Representatives, the chair-
man of the select committee to which the issue was re-
ferred frankly exposed substantial reasons for taking up
arms against that country. ‘‘We could deprive her,” he
said, ‘‘of her extensive provinces lying along our borders
to the North. These provinces are not only immensely
valuable in themselves, but almost indispensable to the exist-
ence of Great Britain. . . . By carrying on such a war .
we should be able in a short time to remunerate ourselves
ten fold for all the spoliations she has committed on our
commerce.”’

Geographical destiny seemed also to indicate the way.
“The waters of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi,” as-
serted another member of the House, ‘‘interlock in a num:
ber of places; and the great Disposer of Human Events in-
tended those two rivers should belong to the same people.”

If farmers of the Northwest were to get their portion

412 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

from a war on England, planters of the South were also
to have a reward. For a long time leaders in that section,
especially in Georgia and Tennessee, had looked upon the
two Floridas as a part of their economic empire. That
broad belt of land cut off the gulf on a long coast line;
it was inhabited by Indians who sometimes made expedi-
tions into the United States; and in its hospitable swamps
and everglades runaway slaves found a refuge. Here were
strategic reasons for extending the ‘“‘natural frontiers” of
the United States.

Moreover, there were questions of legality to be con-
sidered. Since the terms of the Louisiana Purchase were
vague, the American war party could advance a claim, how-
ever dubious, to West Florida, and since Spain owed Amer-
ican citizens a large bill for damages done to their trade,
the same ambitious faction felt justified in seizing East
Florida by way of compensation.

Finally there were contingencies. As the Spanish mon-
archy was allied with England in the European war, its
Florida territory might serve as an English base if hos-
tilities arose between the United States and the mother
country. So West Florida was declared to be American
soil and to complete the operation, Congress, early in
1811, authorized the President to take possession of East
Florida and hold it pending negotiations. It was abun-
dantly evident by 1812 that a war with England might
bring about the consummation so devoutly wished.

In the grand sweep of their imagination, ‘“‘the expansion-
ists of 1812” also brought Mexico within their range. In
1804, John Adair, a valiant soldier who later served under
Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, wrote to James
Wilkinson, the ambitious freebooter: ‘The Kentuckyans
are full of enterprise and although not poor, as greedy
after plunder as ever the old Romans were; Mexico glit-
ters in our eyes—the word is all we wait for.” Two years
afterward Aaron Burr launched his expedition to realize
among other things the hope of the southwest, namely,

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 413

wresting Mexico from Spain and bringing a new empire
under Anglo-Saxon hegemony.

Burr failed but his project was not forgotten. ‘‘Citizens
of the West,” exulted a writer of Nashville in the spring
of 1812, “‘a destiny still more splendid is reserved for you.
Behold the empire of Mexico. . . . Here it is that the
statesmen shall see an accession of Territory sufficient to
double the extent of the republic.” If the whole program
could be carried into effect, the ‘“‘new United States” of
which Clay spoke would include the continent of North
America. At all events within a few years Stephen Austin
was occupying Texas.

It was the men of the agricultural frontier who cherished
these ambitions and at last brought about the declaration
of hostilities against England in 1812. ‘There is no doubt
on that point. Professor Pratt has plotted on a map the
constituencies of the congressmen who voted for the war
resolution and has shown that their districts stretched from
New Hampshire to Georgia in the form of a great crescent
bending westward. ‘‘From end to end,” he says, ‘“‘the
crescent traversed frontier territory, bordering foreign soil,
British or Spanish, or confronting dangerous Indian tribes
among whom foreign influence was suspected and feared.
. . . Nothing could better demonstrate the frontier char-
acter of the war spirit than to observe its progressive de-
cline as we pass from the rim of the crescent to its center
at the national capital. Expansionist enthusiasm declined
even more rapidly.”

Equally rooted in practical considerations was the op-
position to the war. ‘The Federalist party,’ continues
Professor Pratt, ‘“‘grounded chiefly in the mercantile and
financial interests of the coast towns, the college-bred pro-
fessional men, the more solid and ‘respectable’ elements in
society, was fairly homogeneous in its creeds of both foreign
and domestic politics. Abroad it looked upon Napoleon
as Anti-Christ and endorsed Pickering’s famous toast, ‘The
world’s last hope—Britain’s fast-anchored isle.’ In home

414 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

affairs, it was convinced, not without cause, that the Repub-
lican administration had deliberately resolved to ruin its
commerce and dissipate its prosperity. Holding these
views, it could see no worse national crime than a war
against England which would render indirect aid to
Napoleon, and no worse disaster to its interests than a
form of expansion which would mean new states to in-
crease the Republican strength in Congress.” ‘There was
the alignment of the forces for and against the second war

with England.
§

Although the war party was united in overbearing the
Federalists and their allies, it was sharply divided against
itself over aims and methods, and displayed in that schism a
fatal weakness which in the end balked the purposes of
both factions. The southern planters who wanted the
Floridas looked with deep misgivings upon the project for
adding Canada to the growing power of the North; while
northern farmers who wanted Canada did not actually wish
to see the planting wing strengthened by new estates on
the Gulf of Mexico. |

This division in opinion appeared in 1811, even before
war was declared. When a provisional scheme authorizing
the President to raise forces competent to conquer Canada
was presented in Congress, ‘“‘an almost solid South joined
with Federalist New England to defeat it.” The same dis-
cord was manifest a few days after the declaration of war,
when the House of Representatives passed a bill empow-
ering the President to occupy East and West Florida.
This was, of course, pleasing to the southern contingent,
but as soon as an amendment was offered in the Senate
looking toward the possession of Canada also, it was voted
down by a combination of Federalists and southern Repub-
licans. Once more the issue was presented in 1813 in the
form of a bill providing for the occupation of East Florida,
which was demolished by a bloc of Senators drawn mainly

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 415

from the region north of the Potomac. ‘‘We consent that
you may conquer Canada; permit us to conquer Florida!”
exclaimed a Federalist statesman taunting the war faction;
but if this was the exact language of the bargain, the par-
ties to the contract could not on any terms unite in an efh-
cient effort to realize their conflicting aims.

The truth seems to be that President Madison’s admin-
istration—‘‘the Virginia dynasty’’—although it was ready
enough to annex the Floridas, was lukewarm on the con-
quest of Canada. At least it was fully aware of the dangers
inhering in that operation. Time and again John Ran-
dolph of Roanoke, bitter foe of the war, had informed
the public that the seizure of Canada would assure northern
supremacy over the planting interest and had openly warned
his brethren against it. In one of his outbreaks against
the expansionists of the Northwest, he declared: ‘‘Canada
seems tempting in their sight. ‘That rich vein of Genesee
land which is said to be even better on the other side of the
lake than on this. Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right,
urges the war. ... It is to acquire a preponderating
northern influence that you are to launch into war.”

Beyond all question, James Monroe, who served first as
Madison’s Secretary of State and then as head of the War
Department, shared Randolph’s dislike of the Canadian
adventure, going so far as to say bluntly that the invasion
of Canada was to be viewed “‘not as an object of the war
but as a means to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”
Indeed, if we may believe General Armstrong, who was
forced out of the War Department by Madison, Monroe
actually instructed the southern generals on the northern
front ‘‘not to do too much,” explaining to them ‘“‘that this
was secretly the wish of the President.”

Although there was some spleen in the General’s state-
ment, there can be no doubt about three facts pertinent to
the controversy: the northern wing of the war party was
rather indifferent about the seizure of the Floridas; the
southern wing did not look upon the conquest of Canada

416 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with enthusiasm; and the direction of the war was in the
hands of the southern contingent.

§

Such was the background for the great decision made by
the federal government in 1812 and of the armed conflict it
waged. Such were the primary causes of the ‘‘second war
for independence,”’ as it is often called. Such were the am-
bitions that inspired the belligerent party which took pos-
session of the House of Representatives in 1811—the party
headed by leaders known in history as ‘‘war hawks.”

Lest there be some doubt as to the real goal ahead,
its views were fairly voiced by two young members des-
tined to be mighty figures in the nation: Henry Clay of Ken-
tucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Both were
passionate in their demand for war. Both spoke for the
expansionists. Clay, in a blaze of enthusiasm, announced
that “the militia of Kentucky alone are competent to place
Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”’ Calhoun with
equal confidence exclaimed: ‘‘So far from being unprepared,
Sir, I believe that in four weeks from the time a declara-
tion of war is heard on our frontier, the whole of upper
Canada and a part of lower Canada will be in our power.”
With leaders capable of making such forecasts, the rank
and file behind the ‘‘war hawks’”’ were even more impatient
to fling the burden of fire and sword on the army and the
navy.

So in June, 1812, the resolution breaking with Great
Britain passed the House of Representatives by a vote
of seventy-nine to forty-nine and the Senate by nineteen to
thirteen—with the spokesmen of the South and West
aligned against the members from the commercial North-
east. In this light manner planters and farmers precipitated
a struggle on land and sea for which they had made no
effective preparation.

At the moment the standing army had about seven thou-

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 417

sand men in the field and it was necessary to enlarge the
land forces immediately. Instead of profiting from the
experiences of the Revolution, Congress resorted to the old
devices which had proved so costly then: it supplemented
the regulars by a volunteer force and appealed to the state
militia. It even made one mistake which had been avoided
in the war for independence: refusing to create a unified
command under a single general, it committed the grave
task of directing the war to many hands. Moreover, it
entrusted the business of furnishing supplies and munitions
to political contractors later characterized by General
Upton as a “‘swarm of parasites who fattened upon every
reverse to Our arms.”

As a result of these measures and policies, the only offen-
sive stroke of power which the government could really
make, namely, an invasion of Canada, failed to accomplish
its objective. There was the usual display of valor on the
part of officers, regulars, and the best of the militia but
their achievements were all out of proportion to their
sacrifices.

When the war commenced there were about five thousand
British regulars in Canada. Instead of making one con-
solidated drive upon them and destroying them in a single
campaign, the Madison government, divided in counsels
and hampered by the anti-war party, made one half-hearted
attempt after another, dragged out the war for nearly three
years, summoned innumerable bodies of militiamen to the
colors, lost more than five thousand soldiers, killed and
wounded, and in the end did not destroy the British and
take Canada.

Again and again raw recruits failed to meet the iron
test. On one occasion four thousand mounted men from a
section that had cheered for the war abandoned their com-
mander before they came within a hundred miles of the
enemy and rushed back in haste to their homes. On an-
other occasion a body of militia refused to cross into Can-
ada to support their American brethren engaged in a des-

418 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

perate and unequal contest a short distance away—because,
the officers alleged, the men were not lawfully bound to
serve outside the country.

In the course of this strange contest, the United States
called out about fifty thousand regulars, ten thousand
volunteers, and four hundred and fifty thousand militia-
men to cope with British forces which at the moment of
greatest strength did not exceed seventeen thousand disci-
plined soldiers. On one side of the ledger Madison’s ad-
ministration could show some minor victories in the North
and Andrew Jackson’s triumph at New Orleans; on the
other side it had to place the capture of Detroit by the
British, an invasion of New York, and the destruction of
the federal buildings in Washington.

The navy within the limits of its equipment was in a
better condition than the army. It was not hampered by
state interference or by the necessity of handling raw
militiamen but it had neither the tonnage nor the guns
required for a contest with the greatest sea power on earth.
Called upon to defend a long coast line and protect an
extensive commerce, it rendered a good account of itself.
Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, Macdonough’s stroke at
Plattsburg, and the stirring deeds of Lawrence, Rodgers,
and a score of commanders bore testimony to the valor of
American seamen. Aided by a swarm of privateers the
navy for many months worked havoc on British commerce,
repaying the patriots for some of the depredations com-
mitted by captains of King George under the guise of
“international law.”’

All this was heroic and afforded new pages for romance
but it was not war and the government of the United States
was in no position to wage one efficiently. When the Brit-
ish ministry finally awoke to the gravity of the situation, it
brought its superior sea power to bear on America with
awful effect. It blockaded the Atlantic coast, paralyzed
American commerce, foreign and domestic, and held the
whole seaboard in a vise-like grip.

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 419
§

After a few months of war it became obvious that neither
of the contending powers was able to deliver a mortal
thrust. Indeed they had hardly begun it when they wished
themselves out of it. Less than a year after the first gun
was fired, President Madison accepted a tender of media-
tion from Russia. In reply to the same proposition, Great
Britain, not adverse herself, expressed a preference for
direct negotiations, offering an olive branch which was
eagerly grasped by the President. In July, 1814, authorized
delegates of the warring nations met at Ghent and after
prolonged negotiations reached an agreement on Christmas
eve,—a few days before General Jackson’s victory over the
British at New Orleans.

It is true that neither party was altogether happy with
the outcome but both had good reasons for desiring peace.
Great Britain, still fearing another storm in France—
which soon came with the return of Napoleon from Elba—
was ready for a settlement demanding no sacrifices of goods
or principles. The government at Washington, on its side,
was careening toward bankruptcy; it was issuing treasury
notes in large amounts and steadily swinging in the direc-
tion of the paper money policies of the Revolutionary
War. Its war loan of 1814 was a disastrous failure; the
bonds of that issue were sold at a twenty per cent discount,
while state banknotes worth only sixty-five cents on the dol-
lar in specie were accepted as cash. And the financiers who
gave their support to the loan, limited as it was, insisted,
as the price of their aid, that the war should stop. Thus
peace was the only alternative to economic collapse, if not
the disruption of the Union. Planters and farmers were
taught some lessons in finance and patriotism.

So the peace came. When the treaty reached the United
States, the people were surprised to find in it no clause
forbidding Great Britain to seize American sailors, de-
stroy American commerce on the high seas, search Ameri-

420 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

can ships, or support Indians on the frontier. It was a
bitter experience for President Madison to compare his
proclamation announcing the objects of the war with the
treaty which gathered the fruits of the contest.

Nevertheless we are told when news of the settlement
arrived, the people ‘“‘passed from gloom to glory.” Bells
pealed in the church steeples; restive school children were
released for a holiday; flags were flung out; and the tav-
erns were crowded with patriots drinking toasts to the
triumph of a great cause. The victory of General Jack-
son at New Orleans seemed a grand climax for the cele-
bration.

§

Throughout this controversy over foreign affairs extend-
ing from the inauguration of Jefferson to the end of the
second war with England in 1815, the division between the
commercial and the agricultural interests, to use the lan-
guage of the day, was clearly discernible. ‘This war, the
measures which preceded it, and the mode of carrying it
on,” exclaimed Josiah Quincy, the outstanding Federalist
champion from Massachusetts, in 1813, ‘‘are all undeniably
southern and western policy, not the policy of the commer-
cial states.” The debates over the Embargo, over meas-
ures of national defense, and over taxes to support the
government, all betrayed the deep economic cleavage that
separated the Northeast from the South and West. When
at length war was declared by Congress, the vote, as we
have seen, ran true to the line of cleavage, cutting across
party ranks and traditional associations.

From the beginning to the end it was the merchants
and shipowners who took the lead in opposing the policies
and measures of the Republican administration. Though
the seamen impressed by the British navy belonged as a
rule to their vessels, they apparently did not feel the
wound to national honor as deeply as did the planters from
the South or the farmers from the West. ‘Though it was

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 421

their trade that was preyed upon by British and French
sea rovers, they were willing to take the bitter with the
sweet, losses accompanied by profits, rather than endure
the irksome restraints of the Embargo. When the federal
government failed to provide a navy strong enough to pro-
tect their commerce and coast fortifications adequate to
the defense of their towns, they accused the farmers and
planters of being the responsible parties.

To them a flag that did not stand for security on the
sea as well as on the land was no flag at all. ‘‘The term
flag,” said Josiah Quincy, “‘is talked about as though there
was something mystical in its very nature—as though a
rag with certain stars and stripes upon it tied to a stick and
called a flag was a wizard wand and entailed security on
everything under it or within its sphere. There is noth-
ing like all this in the nature of the thing. A flag is the
evidence of power. A land flag is the evidence of land
power. A maritime flag is the evidence of maritime power.
You may have a piece of bunting upon a staff, and call it
a flag, but if you have no maritime power to maintain it,
you have a name and no reality; you have the shadow
without the substance; you have the sign of a flag, but in
truth you have no flag.”

After the Republicans had declared war, spokesmen of
the commercial interests continued their opposition. They
began by filing a minority report in Congress which con-
demned the administration in severe language and, until
peace was finally effected, they worked hard to thwart and
prostrate the financial and military measures of the admin-
istration. No doubt, they offered codperation on condi-
tion that the invasion of Canada be abandoned, that the
land forces he confined to defending existing territory,
and that the war on the sea be pressed with vigor. But
failing to get their own way, they poured the vials of their
wrath on the government, denouncing the invasion of Can-
ada and seeking to hamper it. Voicing their sentiments,
Josiah Quincy cried out in Congress that the attack on .

422 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

northern neighbors was less defensible than the conduct of
Captain Kidd, the pirate, and the West Indian buccaneers.

In the same strain opponents of the war railed at every
one of the administration’s bills for raising troops. When,
in the hour of distress, the government was driven to the
last resort, the draft, Federalist orators exhausted their
eloquence in resisting it. In this affray they summoned to
their aid the powerful intellect of Daniel Webster, then a
young member of the House of Representatives, who re-
sponded to the call in a vehement speech—one so furious
that it was deemed expedient to suppress its publication for
nearly a hundred years.

Without mincing words, Webster accused the majority
of trying to demonstrate ‘‘that the government possesses
Over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more
dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of
every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and
degree of misery than has been exercised by any civilized
government, with a single exception, in modern times.”
He protested because the battles which the conscript was
made to fight were “battles of invasion,” warned his hearers
that ‘“‘the nation is not yet in a temper to submit to con-
scription,” and vaguely hinted that the pursuit of such
policies might end in throwing away the government and
dissolving the Union.

In a similar vein the Federalists and a few Republican
allies tried to defeat the loan bills and the tax projects
devised by the administration for the support of the army
and navy. Finally northern critics attacked slavery itself
as the basis of the planters’ power in a government that
forced them to endure and sustain a war they hated.

During this contest of orators, the contending Federal-
ists and Republicans reversed their theories of the Constitu-
tion, thereby revealing again the intimate essence of high
juristic doctrines. In the earlier years when the repre-
sentatives of the commercial states, spokesmen of trade,
finance, and industry, earnestly wished to fund the conti-

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 423

nental debt at face value, transfer the burden of state debts
to the national treasury, found a bank that would serve
business enterprise and enhance the value of federal bonds,
enact tariff laws protecting industry, pass statutes encourag-
ing shipping by bounties and preferences, and stifle criticism
by sedition bills, the Federalists were hardly able to find
language strong enough in which to express their feelings
about maintaining national supremacy, repressing states’
rights, and upholding the broad view of the Constitution.
Being in possession of the government, they easily assumed
that Congress could lawfully do anything which they
thought ‘‘necessary and proper.”

On the other hand, the Jeffersonians, then out of power
and opposed to most of the economic measures sponsored
by the Federalists, took the opposite tack. Everything
they did not like was unconstitutional and the United States
was to them little more than a league of independent
commonwealths.

But as soon as the tables were turned, philosophy turned
a somersault too. Republicans now displayed as much
agility in expounding the constitutionality of their own
measures as they had once showed in opposing Hamilton’s
measures. When Jefferson was troubled with constitu-
tional scruples in connection with the Louisiana Purchase,
as we have seen, he did not press the point; on the con-
trary, he wrote that “‘the less that is said about any Con-
stitutional difficulty, the better. Congress should do what
is necessary in silence.’”’ When Josiah Quincy, angry over
the admission of the state of Louisiana, invoked the right
of secession, it was a southern member of Congress who
called him to order. When pacific resistance to the Em-
bargo appeared in New England, ten years after Kentucky’s
defiance and twenty years before South Carolina’s nullifica-
tion, it was a congressman from North Carolina who spoke
boldly of enforcing federal authority. ‘‘What!” he ex-
claimed. ‘Shall not our laws be executed? Shall their
authority be defied? I am for enforcing them at every

424 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

hazard.” When the minority in Congress protested
against the war, President Madison pronounced the act
akin to treason.

With the same facility the Federalists now took the nar-
row view of the Constitution and defended the sovereignty
of the state, playing their new role with as much astuteness
as they had played the old. In keeping with changed cir-
cumstances, everything they opposed they declared uncon-
stitutional: the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional;
the Embargo was unconstitutional; the admission of Louisi-
ana as a state was unconstitutional. It was a rare war
measure that did not violate the law of the land. ‘The
issue of paper money receivable in taxes,’ complained
Quincy, ‘‘was unconstitutional because it was a violation
of faith previously pledged.”

In fighting the conscription act, Webster also took refuge
in the Constitution. The principles of the bill, he said,
“are not warranted by any provision of the Constitution

. not connected with any power which the Constitution
has conferred on Congress. ... [The Constitution is
libelled, foully libelled. . . . Where is it written in the Con-
stitution, in what article or section is it contained that you
may take children from their parents and parents from their
children and compel them to fight the battles of any war in
which the folly or the wickedness of Government may
engage it? . .. An attempt to maintain this doctrine upon
the provisions of the Constitution is an exercise of perverse
ingenuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free
Government.”

And if the federal government insisted on enforcing un-
constitutional laws, then, shouted Josiah Quincy, speaking
for Massachusetts, in the language of Kentucky, ‘‘the peo-
ple of each of the associated states are competent not only
to discuss but to decide.” Higher than this line of argu-
ment it was not possible for them to go.

Such criticisms were by no means confined to Congress.
While the national government was waging its desperate

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 425

contest, first by diplomacy and then by arms on land and
sea, against a formidable antagonist, even while the capi-
tol of the United States was being sacked and burned by the
enemy, whole sections of the commercial states were in
open and active opposition to what they contemptuously
called ‘‘Mr. Madison’s war.”

By formal resolutions official bodies in New England
roundly condemned it. A Boston town meeting saw in
“the calamities of the present unjust and ruinous war”
and the disturbances connected with it, nothing but a pre-
lude “‘to the dissolution of all free government and the es-
tablishment of a reign of terror.’’ ‘he lower house of the
Massachusetts legislature called upon the people to organ-
ize a “peace party” throughout the country. ‘Express
your sentiments without fear,” ran the clarion appeal, ‘‘and
let the sound of your disapprobation of this war be loud
and deep... . If your sons must be torn from you by
conscriptions, consign them to the care of God; but let
there be no volunteers except for a defensive war.”

Individuals went beyond official bodies in expressing their
emotions. Some members of the Massachusetts legislature
were for an open break with the administration at Wash-
ington, one of them venturing to declare that he would
rather have the British constitution, ‘‘Monarchy and all,”
than the American Constitution with embargoes. Another
exclaimed that ‘‘the sooner we come at issue with the gen-
eral government the better.”’ In the same spirit of aggres-
sion the Boston Daily Advertiser proposed that New Eng-
land withdraw from the war, proclaim her neutrality, and
make a separate treaty with George III. Taking another
tack, the Boston Gazette suggested that the peace party
should follow ‘“‘the example of the convention of which the
revered Washington was president,’ and call a national
assembly for the purpose of framing a new constitution
to be binding on two, three, four, five, or any number of
states ratifying it.

In a philosophical vein, the leading Federalist paper of

426 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Boston, the Columbian Centinel, declared that the alle-
giance of citizens to the federal government was secondary
and qualified while their allegiance to their respective state
governments was natural, inalienable, and founded on the
will of God “as collected from expediency.’”’ More ma-
terial to the outcome, the financial interests of New York
and Boston—still Federalist in politics and opposed to a war
forced upon them by planters and farmers—failed to come
whole-heartedly to the aid of the administration. In fact,
the sale of government bonds in northern cities was de-
liberately subjected to capitalistic sabotage and the sinews
of war withheld from a government fighting for its life.

Resistance to federal authority was by no means limited
to paper declarations and private agreements. When, on
the authority of the President of the United States, General
Dearborn appealed to the governor of Massachusetts for
certain militia detachments to protect the country against
the foe, the latter, with the approval of his council,
bluntly refused to accede to the request. Instead of rush-
ing to arms in defense of the flag, he proclaimed a fast day
as an atonement for waging war “‘against the nation from
which we are descended and which for many generations
has been the bulwark of the religion which we profess.”
Equally recalcitrant, the governor and the legislature of
Connecticut refused to supply their quota of militiamen and
let the President know that ‘‘the state of Connecticut is a
free, sovereign, and independent state; that the United
States are a confederacy of states.”’

To speak summarily, all the New England governors,
except the chief executive of New Hampshire, took the
position that they could comply with demands for militia-
men or reject them, as their judgment dictated. In prac-
tice, they did not oppose recruiting for the United States
army by “lawful” process within their states, or attempt
to block volunteering; indeed, Massachusetts furnished
more soldiers to the regular army than any other state save
New York. But they held that the Constitution did not

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 427

authorize the use of the militia except to execute the laws
of the Union, suppress insurrection, and repel invasion,
and they were no doubt happy to have legal warrant for
declining to aid in the prosecution of the war.

Determined to make resistance to ““Mr. Madison’s war’”’
more effective, the Massachusetts legislature in October,
1814, issued a call to the other states to send delegates to
a general convention ‘“‘for the purpose of devising proper
measures to procure the united efforts of the commercial
states, to obtain such amendments and explanations of the
Constitution as will secure them from further evils.’’ Con-
necticut and Rhode Island responded favorably; local con-
ventions in New Hampshire and Vermont promptly chose
representatives; and the assembly met at Hartford on De-
eember 15) 1614.

In theory and in fact, the Hartford convention was a
congress representing commercial interests—appealing to
the trading states as against the agricultural sections of
the South and West. It set forth, without redundant
verbiage, the proposition that the Union was a balance of
economic powers and that the commercial states were in
mortal danger of being dominated and ruined by a com-
bination of southern planters and western farmers.

Distinctly avowing its purpose to be the protection of
the trading interests against agrarian majorities in the
Congress of the United States, the Hartford convention
offered a series of amendments to the federal Constitu-
tion. One clause provided that the power of the plant-
ing section be reduced by the complete exclusion of slaves
from the count in assigning to the states their Representa-
tives in Congress on the basis of population. Other clauses
proposed that a two-thirds vote be required in Congress
to admit new states, to impose an embargo on foreign
commerce, or to declare war, except in case of actual in-
vasion. ‘The language of the Hartford resolutions, though
temperate, was firm, the concluding passages warning the
country that if the application for amendments was not

428 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

successful and the war continued to rage, it would be
expedient to hold another assembly armed “‘with such pow-
ers and instructions as the exigency of a crisis so momentous
may require.”

In answer to the defiant policy of New England, the
federal government resorted to no caustic measures. In
preparing his message of November, 1812, President Madi-
son felt ‘‘constrained to advert to the refusal of the gov-
ernors of Massachusetts and Connecticut to furnish their
required detachments of militia,’ but Congress passed no
alien and sedition acts, created no system for spying upon
citizens, made no provision for hunting down those who
could see neither justice nor wisdom in the war. Crabbed
old John Randolph of Roanoke laughed loud and long
when he read that the New England Federalists were
standing forth in shining armor as apostles of nullifica-
tion and the champions of states’ rights. The Richmond
Enquirer, as if forgetting the Kentucky and Virginia reso-
lutions, broke out in moral indignation: ‘No man, no asso-
ciation of men, no state or set of states has a right to with-
draw itself from this union of its own accord. . . . The
majority of states which form the union must consent to
the withdrawal of any one branch of it. Until that con-
sent has been obtained, any attempt to dissolve the union or
to obstruct the efficacy of its constitutional laws, is Trea-
son—Treason to all intents and purposes.”

But the federal government enacted no such sentiments
into law, and fortunately for the country, the arrival of
news of peace, early in 1815, made it unnecessary for the
New England Federalists to hold another convention at
Hartford, or anywhere else. Nearly half a century be-
yond the portals of the hour lay Fort Sumter.

§

The close of the second war with England and the fiscal
policies pursued by the government in settling its troubled

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 429

estate completed the discomfiture of the Federalist party
as an organization. With respect to the old issue of the
tariff, the revenue act of 1816, made necessary by the
requirements of war finance, afforded a degree of protection
to American industries that would have delighted Alex-
ander Hamilton. A warm champion of the measure, Clay
saw in it the beginning of an American system. Calhoun
declared that it guaranteed a domestic market to farmers
and planters and made them independent of the vicissitudes
of European wars. After protesting mildly in the name
of her shipping interests at the moment engaged in a pros-
perous carrying trade, New England turned to industries
fostered by a benevolent shelter. Everywhere the manu-
facturers—who had flourished while English competition
had been cut down by the war—rejoiced in the conversion
of the Jeffersonians to “sound national doctrines.”

In reforming their disordered finances just as in fram-
ing tariff schedules, the Republicans felt compelled to resort
to Federalist policies, by establishing a second United
States Bank. During the war, the management of the
treasury had been unhappy, to say the least. The govern-
ment had been seriously embarrassed by the refusal of the
banking interests to give their loyal support; and the inca-
pacity of the Republican fiscal system to bear extraordinary
strain had been amply demonstrated.

Indeed, it could hardly be said that there was any sys-
tem. On the expiration of its charter in 1811, Hamilton’s
Bank had been allowed to lapse; and the banking business
of the country had passed into the hands of numerous
state corporations and concerns of varying strength and
soundness. In five years the number of these institutions
had increased from eighty-eight to two hundred and forty-
six and their note issues had risen from about fifty million
to approximately one hundred million dollars—an inflation
so magnificent that all but the New England houses sus-
pended specie payment when the city of Washington was
captured by the British.

430 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The effect of this chaos on the Madison administration
was disastrous. An agricultural government, without the
support of a national banking institution, without the gen-
erous assistance of the strongest northern banks, it had
to finance its operations on the basis of its dubious credit—
with baleful results. For its bonds floated between 1812
and 1816 totaling over $80,000,000, the treasury received
only about $34,000,000 measured in specie; and in the
process the government increased its obligations from
$45,200,000 to the appalling sum of $127,334,000, the
increment alone amounting to more than the domestic debt
incurred during the Revolutionary War and funded by
Hamilton.

Accordingly, the economic position of the Republicans in.
1816 was very delicate. ‘Their bills were pressing and, in
meeting their debts, they had only two alternatives: they
could make terms with the bankers of the Northeast or they
could create a new national bank under their own political
auspices—an insistent dilemma in which they adopted the
latter expedient. If this choice compelled them to reverse
their position on the legality of the Bank, at least they could
say that it spared them a greater humiliation, a Republi-
can surrender to private finance. Even Madison could
bring himself to accept the unavoidable. Years before he
had declared Hamilton’s Bank unconstitutional; the Con-
stitution remained unchanged, but he approved the new
bank bill when presented by Congress. So it became a
law and by a single stroke an energetic body of men asso-
ciated with the public debt and the national banking system
was temporarily attracted to the Republican interest—
Jefferson’s agricultural interest—just as in former times a
similar group had been affiliated with the Federalists. Al-
though a few old radicals like John Taylor who had thun-
dered against the “corrupt squadron” in Washington’s ad-
ministration protested against ‘‘the surrender to the money
power,” their outcries were in vain. The new Bank was
duly chartered in 1816.

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 431

Encouraged by the turn in national politics, cautious and
wise Federalists, who had a keen sense for the substance
of things, gradually shifted to the Republican side. A
faithful “rear guard” put up a candidate at the presidential
election of 1816, but, after a thorough drubbing at the
hands of James Monroe, even it withdrew from the national
field and confined its actions, steadily diminishing, to state
elections. Harmony then became the keynote. When Presi-
dent Monroe made a grand tour of New England in 1817,
the hard-boiled Boston Centinel burst forth in generous
words of praise, under the caption: “The Era of Good
Feeling’’—a phrase that was echoed by the populace and
with some reason applied to the eight years of Monroe’s
service in the White House.

§

This process of conciliation was aided by the temporary
drift in the affairs of Europe. While the restoration of
the Bourbons in France, after the overthrow of Napoleon
at Waterloo in 1815, had allayed the fears of the most
incorrigible Federalist, the course of the French Revolu-
tion through Jacobinism, dictatorship, empire, and restora-
tion had dashed the high hopes of the most loyal Demo-
crat. Gains had been won for liberty—France was at last
a constitutional monarchy—but disillusionment was for
more than a decade the dominant note among the Jeffer-
sonian radicals. A great experiment in human rights had
been made in Europe but at great cost and with results that
fell far short of the aspirations cherished by the idealists
of 1793. It seemed, therefore, as if both Federalists and
Republicans had heard enough of European politics and
were ready to turn their backs resolutely on the quarrels of
the Old World.

It was not possible, however, for the stoutest apostle of
isolation to avoid altogether the politics of international
contacts. Indeed, a short time after the collapse of

432 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Napoleon at Waterloo, the government at Washington was
engaged in a serious negotiation with Spain over the fate
of the two Floridas, a fate left unsettled by the War of
1812. All the reasons that had led the expansionists of
that year to covet the two provinces were still operating.
All the grievances that had then afforded grounds of irri-
tation—smuggling across the border, Indian raids, and the
escape of slaves into the everglades—were still unredressed.
At the same time, Spain, weakened by domestic disturbances
and engaged in a contest with her rebellious colonies in
South America, was in no position to govern the trouble-
some Floridas or remove the causes of American discontent.
Thus, the seal of propriety was given to punitive expe-
ditions.

In 1818 another Indian outbreak snapped the tension.
General Andrew Jackson, acting on vague orders from
Washington, led his impetuous men across the border into
Spanish territory and commenced a diligent search for
offenders against American security and peace. He took
possession of St. Marks and Pensacola, summarily hanged
two British subjects engaged in dubious undertakings along
the coast, and in effect established American sovereignty
over the entire region. In these circumstances, there was
nothing for the King of Spain to do but make the most
of the inevitable, and accordingly, on Washington’s birth-
day in 1819, his minister in Washington signed a treaty
yielding the Floridas to the possessor. In exchange the
United States agreed to pay five million dollars to its own
citizens, discharging claims for damages to American com-
merce committed by Spanish authorities during the recent
European war. As a part of the general adjustment the
Secretary of State also accepted the Sabine River and a line
drawn to the northwest as the boundary of the Louisiana
Territory, in this way disposing of a long-standing uncer-
tainty. Though, in the acquisition of the Floridas, more
territory was secured, it did not appear that President
Monroe was worried by constitutional scruples. His friend

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM +59

and adviser, Jefferson, still lived but doubts on the point
had been laid by tradition.

Hard upon the heels of the Florida purchase came an-
other incident in foreign relations which brought the trans-
actions of Europe forcibly into the purview of American
politics. Once more the unsettled state of Spain was the
cause of trepidation. During the Napoleonic upheaval and
the dissolution which followed, Spanish colonies on the
American mainland declared their independence, precipitat-
ing a costly and desultory war between the metropolis and
the former provinces. In her enfeebled state Spain could
not subdue the rebels; in her pride she could not yield to
them. And while the struggle was in course, another revo-
lution broke out in Madrid and spread to Italy, threatening
the security of the recently pacified Europe. In his dilemma,
King Ferdinand frantically appealed to friendly monarchs
for assistance.

His brethren of the purple, eager to suppress revolution
in the Old World, naturally sympathized with projects for
putting down similar disturbances in the New World. On
opposition to republics and representative government, the
sovereigns of the Continent were all strongly united.
Indeed, three of the great autocracies—Austria, Prussia,
and Russia—were already formally bound, under the Holy
Alliance of 1815 and collateral agreements, to codperate in
maintaining the status quo and in preserving the purity of
the monarchical principle. Given a pretext for common
action by alarming events in Spain and Italy and moved
by appeals for help against popular uprisings, the leading
powers sent delegates to a conference at Verona in 1822
to see what could be done to stabilize Europe. It is true
that on due deliberation the diplomats shrank from prom-
ising direct support to King Ferdinand, but their sympathies
were unmistakable. The Tsar of Russia, who in virtue of
his extensive claims along the west coast of North America
had interests in both hemispheres, was more than platonic:
he proposed that military aid be rendered to Spain in her

434 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

domestic difficulties, paving the way for a possible restora-
tion of Spanish sovereignty over the former provinces, now
pluming themselves as republics.

To these plans England refused to become a party. The
rising flood of British democracy that was soon to carry
the reform bill of 1832 was even then breaking over the
bulwarks of established institutions, warning the Tories in
office against reactionary adventures abroad. Furthermore,
British statesmen, deriving their powers from Parliament,
could not consistently approve the doctrines of Verona or
give aid to the Spanish monarch in a war on representative
government. Still more potent, perhaps, in restraining the
London cabinet was the opposition of British merchants
to any indorsement of Spain’s projects for recovering
her American resources. Having built up a lucrative traffic
with her colonies after the monopoly of Madrid was
broken by revolt, traders on the banks of the Thames were
in no mood to see their business destroyed by a restoration
of Spanish authority. Thrown thus by political and eco-
nomic interests on the side of non-intervention in behalf of
Spain, the British secretary for foreign affairs, Canning,
suggested to the American minister in London codperation
between the United States and oe in resolving the
Spanish-American crisis.

At the same time, the government at Washington, with
John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State in the lead, was
taking its bearings. Fully appreciating the importance of
the news that Great Britain would not assist the despotic
continental powers, President Monroe consulted Madison
and Jefferson, receiving from them advice to join forces with
England in opposing the restoration of Spain’s dominion in
the New World. In all other official circles the issue like-
wise became a subject of animated discussion—so many men
expressing similar views on the crisis that the authorship
of the policy later known as the Monroe Doctrine was
obscured by a cloud of witnesses. With good authority it
has been accorded to Adams; with equal sanction the honor

AGRICULTURAL IMPERIALISM 435

has been conferred upon Monroe; a few English writers
have put in the claims of Canning.

Undoubtedly the influence of Adams was very great but
the idea was in general circulation. ‘The logic of the situa-
tion was manifest and Monroe understood it as well as any
member of his administration. A fair judgment, therefore,
seems to be that the historic Doctrine was the fruit of col-
laboration by the President, the Secretary of State, and
their close political counselors.

The result of their deliberations was embodied in Mon-
roe’s message to Congress on December 2, 1823, in which
he served notice forcefully and definitely on the autocrats
of Europe that he would regard ‘“‘any attempt on their part
to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as
dangerous to our peace and safety.’’ With the same pre-
cision, he declared that, while the United States would not
interfere with the colonies in the Western Hemisphere still
possessed by European powers, it would range itself on the
side of those that had declared their independence. Any
attempt by a European country to oppress or control them,
he declared in a voice of warning, would be viewed here as
“the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the
United States.”

Besides disposing of that matter, the President also re-
ferred to the claims of Russia on the northwest coast.
With respect to such pretensions, he admonished all and
sundry that ‘‘the American continents, by the free and inde-
pendent condition which they have assumed and main-
tained,” are not henceforth to be considered ‘‘as subjects
for future colonization by any European power.”

Happily formulated, favored by the times, and backed
in effect by the British navy, the Monroe Doctrine at once
gained a potency in world affairs that went far beyond the
military strength of the rising American republic. In the
circumstances, neither Spain nor any of her continental asso-
ciates was in a position to make an effective answer to the
ultimatum; so the President’s triumph was complete. For-

436 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tunately for him, too, the Doctrine pleased all factions in
the United States. Democrats saw in it a vindication of
revolutionary principles in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson
and agricultural imperialists read between the lines the
promise of a free hand in the Southwest. Federalists, dis-
covering in the Doctrine a guarantee that Latin-American
ports would be open to their enterprise, added their joyful
praise to the general pean. When his term came to an end,
Monroe could retire amid the plaudits of his countrymen.
It was gratifying to ‘‘the bantling America,” if somewhat
ironical, that a member of the old régime who opposed the
adoption of the Constitution could strike a note of such
sweeping nationalism.

CHAPTER X

The Young Republic

: HE launching of the new republic produced a ferment
of ideas that touched all shores of thought and

challenged all the creative energies of the Ameri-
can people. In the profound economic and political move-
ments of the period were effected deep changes in the whole
cultural life of the country—its class arrangements, intel-
lectual concerns, esthetic interests, provisions for the pro-
motion of knowledge and encouragement of the arts.
From foreign sources came impacts scarcely less disturb-
ing to the culture handed down from colonial times. When
the provincial status under an insular Britain was cast off,
closer affiliations were formed with other centers than Lon-
don, from Paris round the world to Canton. ‘The gates
were widened for a freer inpouring of French, German, and
Italian science and opinion, invigorating every branch of
life. The colonies had been essentially British, theological,
conservative; the new states born of the Revolution were
swept into a national current, made a part of the world
system of powers, shaken by the multiplication of secular

437

438 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

interests, and quickened with the dynamic of the progres-
sive philosophy.
§

By the requirements of the war and the economic exi-
gencies that followed it, the ablest and noblest minds of the
United States were forced to think in common terms of
national affairs. While the British government and the
British navy defended and controlled the thirteen colonies,
that intellectual and moral operation had not been neces-
sary. Now it could not be denied or eluded. The continu-
ing requirements of defense, the funding of the continental
debt, the assumption of state debts, the creation of a com-
mon currency and banking system, the erection of a customs
union, and the enactment of protective legislation for ship-
ping and industry nourished classes that looked to the na-
tional government as the center of power, stability, and
affection.

Moreover, the establishment of the federal capital—
first in New York, then in Philadelphia, and finally in the
District of Columbia—provided a metropolis where the
representatives of all sections and all interests assembled
for negotiation, compromise, and adjustment. Beyond
question the social and intellectual effects of a common
center were positive and constructive. Farmers and plant-
ers, as well as merchants, financiers, and manufacturers,
turned to it for aid and comfort in the advancement of their
projects, and few were so small in mind that they did not
now grasp some concept of national destiny associated with
the federal union. ‘Those who henceforth appealed to the
American people whether in economic and political argu-
ment, in drama, in poetry, in fiction, or in the arts had to
reckon with national ideas and national emotions.

‘The development of a central government—one of the
emergencies sprung upon the isolated provincials by inde-
pendence—was of necessity a secular process, thus falling
into line with the whole movement so eloquently described

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC HD

by Lecky in his history of rationalism. Puritans might lord
it over Anglicans in New England, Anglicans might display
their pretensions before Catholics and Quakers in Mary-
land and Virginia, Catholics might long for an establish-
ment of papal authority over all, and Presbyterians might
rule with an iron hand their communities on the frontier,
but under Providence none of them was strong enough to
get a mastery over the federal government, even if the
Deists who wielded high powers in the drafting of the
Constitution had been willing to bow before the winds of
sectarian passion.

Inexorably, therefore, the national government was secu-
lar from top to bottom. Religious qualifications for voting
and office-holding, which appeared in the contemporary
state constitutions with such profusion, found no place
whatever in the federal Constitution. Its preamble did not
invoke the blessings of Almighty God or announce any
interest in promoting the propaganda of religion. Instead,
it declared purposes that were earthly and in keeping with
the progressive trend of the age—‘‘to form a more perfect
union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide
for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our pos-
terity.”’ And the First Amendment, added by the radicals
in 1791, declared that ‘Congress shall make no law respect-
ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.’’ In dealing with Tripoli, President
Washington allowed it to be squarely stated that “‘the gov-
ernment of the United States is not in any sense founded
upon the Christian religion.”

Besides rearing a national government on a secular basis,
the Revolution and the forces set in motion by it made many
modifications in the arrangement and weight of the social
classes. Slavery, at the bottom of the scale, was attacked
by abolition in northern states and by an extensive volun-
tary emancipation in the South. Although the system of
indentured servitude remained in the full protection of law

440 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and custom, the opening of the western frontier facilitated
the rise of freedom in the economic scale and within a gen-
eration the immigration of European laborers reduced the
practice of indenture to the vanishing point.

At the top of the social order inherited from England
and nourished in colonial times dislocations were numerous
and significant. In the concrete, the ‘‘wealth and talents”
of colonial America were decimated by the overthrow of
English protectors and defenders. The expulsion and flight
of the English official classes—governors, army officers,
judges, and retainers of every type—raised to a prouder
estate the second stratum of American society—merchants,
yeomen, planters, and farmers; and in the general upward
heave mechanics soon found their way higher in the scale
of things. George Washington could not get an important
post in the British army but he became Commander-in-chief
of the continental army. John Adams, who in his youth
had hoed corn in Massachusetts and in his manhood been
snubbed by the superior persons of the British official
entourage at Boston, became minister to the Court of King
George. Thomas Jefferson, the son of an obscure yeoman
of Virginia, was lifted to the post of governor, served as
minister to France, directed the nation for eight years as
chief executive, and became a leader of defiant democracy,
known around the world for his intellectual acumen.

At the very moment when by revolution each stratum of
the free society was being raised a notch in the scale, heavy
responsibilities for the maintenance of social order and the
direction of social destiny were laid upon those who gath-
ered political sovereignty into their hands. They had long
been accustomed to a high degree of self-government and
that experience was immensely valuable; but their powers
had been exercised under the close supervision of British
authority—an authority that could be invoked at any
moment in the interest of property. Never had they tasted
the heady wine of republican freedom to rule or ruin
themselves.

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 441

So when the protecting walls of the British Empire were
shaken down, as the unexpected end of a local outbreak, all
the burdens connected with the support of law and
order fell upon newly-emancipated governing classes. Inex-
orably they were invited to consider all questions of religion,
ethics, natural science, politics, economics, education, litera-
ture, and humanism in a novel relation—‘in relation to con-
cepts of national destiny. It was in these circumstances
that the narrow, stuffy, provincial thinking of the thirteen
English colonies flowered into the renaissance of the modern
age. If one faction, aided by the old Tories, conceived
their task as that of holding slaves, indentured servants,
and disfranchised mechanics down to their historic levels,
another party rose valiantly above that materialist project
and conceived their mission in terms of the larger humanism
then sweeping through the western world.

§

In the formation of new and vitalizing connections with
the Continent were strengthened the slight bonds that had
been forged in the realm of culture during the colonial age.
Legations were now established in European capitals and
diplomatic representatives of the great powers in due time
also appeared at the political center of the United States.
Naturally the new relations were closest with the French,
who had recently been such welcome allies against the Eng-
lish foe. Indeed, several French officers, attracted by the
extraordinary opportunities of the New World, remained
in America after the war, casting in their lot with the re-
public. Among them were artists, scientists, and engineers,
including Major L’Enfant who, under the direction of
Washington and Jefferson, planned the new capital for the
United States. Moreover, statesmen and philosophers in
France maintained a lively interest in the American ex-
periment. In 1784, Louis XVI offered Harvard a botanical
garden filled with plants from his own collection, in order.

442 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

that American science might receive the stimulus of Euro-
pean experience. French travelers visited the United States
and wrote illuminating books on the nature and prospects
of the republic.

Simultaneously a French vogue flourished in America.
In Puritan Massachusetts arose the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, which deliberately attempted to repro-
duce “the air of France rather than of England and to
follow the Academy rather than the Royal Society.” Down
in Virginia a French officer, supported by the lieutenant-
governor of the commonwealth, organized an Academy of
Arts and Sciences and a number of southern gentlemen
subscribed heavily to a grand scheme for promoting ad-
vanced researches in connection with the institution. If the
outbreak of the French Revolution had not placed unex-
pected obstacles in the way, the project would no doubt
have been realized in an impressive style.

Among the many forces which beat upon the new republic
through contacts with the Old World, four were of special
significance to the development of American culture;
namely, the accumulating triumphs of natural science to
which all European countries contributed, the achievements
of the English inventors who started the technical upheaval
known as the Industrial Revolution, the dynamic impulse
given to social thinking by the French formulation of the
concept of progress, and the intellectual reverberations of
the French Revolution in the sphere of politics.

All the scientific forces which had commenced a revo-
lution in the age of Bacon and Descartes multiplied and
spread in every direction during the eighteenth century.
Joseph Black, a Scotch physician, Bergman, a Swedish in-
vestigator, Cavendish, Rutherford, and Priestley, English
experimenters, made striking additions to man’s knowl-
edge of the material universe. Lavoisier crowned their
labors by establishing quantitative chemistry on a sure basis. -
In electricity Galvani and Volta were making discoveries
which broke the way for the work of Morse and Edison.

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 443

Physics, botany, zodlogy, comparative anatomy, and physi-
ology were advanced by epoch-making researches which
swept into the discard innumerable inherited traditions,
superstitions, and vagaries. In 1785, three years before
the adoption of the Constitution of the United States,
James Hutton of Edinburgh published a new theory of the
earth, throwing out a cosmic interpretation that contributed
in the decades to come to the series of explosions set off by
Lyell and Darwin in England.

Entangled with the researches of the scientists was the
work of the inventors, Watt, Arkwright, Crompton, and
a host of skillful mechanics, who harnessed power to the
engine, fashioned steel fingers capable of spinning spidery
threads, and started the emancipation of mankind from the
limitations of its material form and physical strength.
While American patriots were setting in motion a political
avalanche, James Watt was starting a_ technological
drive which destroyed the economic heritage of the
centuries.

As fast as scientists and inventors piled up the new knowl-
edge, organizers and publishers distributed it far and wide
among the people. While Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry
were hammering out their weapons for a social battle in
America, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Helvetius, and
their never-resting colleagues in France were fashioning
their vast Encyclopedia—the focus for generations of
scientific labors and the starting point for still more ex-
pansive efforts. Though associated in the common mind
with attacks on religion, its real import was the meager
space which it gave to that ancient monopoly as compared
with the pages and tomes dedicated to man’s understanding
of the material universe, his place in it, and the society of
which he was a part.

In the midst of the intellectual activities which surged up
with increasing power as the eighteenth century advanced
was formulated the most dynamic social theory ever shaped
in the history of thought—the idea of progress or the con.

444 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tinual improvement in the lot of mankind on this earth by
the attainment of knowledge and the subjugation of the
material world to the requirements of human welfare. This
philosophic attitude, as J. B. Bury demonstrates in his excel-
lent history of the subject, was unknown to the ancients,
the Greeks and the Romans, and it was also foreign to
the spirit and doctrines of early Christianity. If Plato and
Aristotle dreamed of an ideal society in which gentlemen
of leisure and taste could enjoy ‘“‘the good life,” they did
not imagine the possible realization of their hope by pro-
gressive efforts over a long period of years; neither did they
stumble upon a thesis of social evolution embracing all
classes and representing an infinite series of adaptations to
human needs, projected through the endless future.

Equally remote from the mind of the medieval theo-
logian, with his theory of man’s degeneration in this life
and dream of bliss in a life to come, was the notion of con-
stant change directed to the material benefit of humanity.
Indeed, not until the modern age could philosophy throw
off the creed of the baffled earthly life, with its resignation
to the brutal yoke of untamed nature.

As Bury points out, certain conditions, appearing only
in modern times, were essential to the development of the
idea of progress. First of all, there had to be a respect for
and interest in the common business of labor and industry
—a respect which neither the slave owners of Athens and
Rome nor the feudal lords of medieval Europe could
acquire. In the next place, there was necessary a climate
for secular thought; the renaissance and the commercial
revolution effected in the age of discovery and colonial
exploitation brought that factor into play. In the third
place, there had to be a liberation from slavish adherence
to written books handed down from antiquity and the
church fathers; natural science by its emphasis on experi-
mentation and observation wrought that revolution in the
realm of mind. Finally, the doctrine of the “‘invariability
of nature’? was needed to free human affairs from the

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 445

shadow of an angry and interfering Providence—a mysteri-

‘ous force acknowledging no laws and obeying no decrees
save those of caprice; Descartes and the philosophic mathe-
maticians of the seventeenth century gave a well-rounded
form to that view, so devastating to those who professed
an intimate familiarity with the ways and wishes of Al-
mighty God.

By the opening of the eighteenth century the intellectual
climate was all set for the idea of progress and in 1737
it was proclaimed by that curious French philosopher, Abbé
de Saint-Pierre, in a work entitled, Observations on the
Continuous Progress of Universal Reason. ‘Here,’ as
Bury says, “we have for the first time, expressed in definite
terms, the vista of an immensely long progressive life in
front of humanity. Civilization is only in its infancy.
Bacon, like Pascal, had conceived it to be in its old age.
. . . [he Abbé was the first to fix his eyes on the remote
destinies of the race and name immense periods of time.”
At last, wrote Saint-Pierre in effect, by shaking off its
inertia and taking thought, mankind can do more to im-
prove its condition in a hundred years than it has done in
two thousand years of traditional complacency.

Once announced in France, the thesis worked irresistibly
among the thinkers who were preparing the way for the
Revolution in that country. The Encyclopedists were more
or less swayed by it. Abbé Morellet dallied with it. In
1770, Sebastien Mercier gave it popular currency in Ger-
many and England as well as France, by his futurist novel,
WreAn2240y..

Two years later Chevalier de Chastellux, who was in a
short time to serve in the war of American independence
and write a remarkable work on American society, ad-
vertised the creed in his book, On Public Felicity, por-
traying as the goal of progressive endeavor a happiness
which consisted ‘“‘in external and domestic peace, abundance
and liberty, the liberty of tranquil enjoyment of one’s own.”
The extraordinary signs of it he proclaimed to be “‘flourish-

446 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ing agriculture, large populations, and the growth of trade
and industry.” ‘Then, in the year that Jefferson wrote the’
Declaration of Independence asserting as nature’s gift the
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Adam
Smith published the Wealth of Nations, a powerful support
for the doctrine of progress in which were celebrated opu-
lence and comfort as the great aim of statecraft.

Already well sanctioned by thinkers, the new theory of
earthly progress, which in its application included the pro-
motion of science and invention, received an immense im-
petus during the French Revolution. That cataclysm was
more than an economic and political transformation; it was
an intellectual upheaval which had relevancies for all the
philosophies and institutions of humanity. Even while the
Reign of Terror was at its height, committees were at work
brushing away the barbarities of the criminal code, trying
to reduce civil law to a reasoned system, devising schemes
of universal education, and projecting new institutes of
science. As the tide of radicalism moved forward, tradi-
tional religion was challenged from every side and the
concept of continuous development on earth placed beside
the ancient promise of bliss in heaven. In creative art and
literature as well, new tendencies accompanied the attempt
to reconstruct the social order.

All this was known in America. Translations of French
works poured from American presses during the early
republican age. And on top of appeals from Gallic writers
came out of France explosive tracts from Thomas Paine,
whose services to the American Revolution won for him
a wider hearing in the United States than Condorcet and
Voltaire could attain.

In keeping with the spirit of his party, Paine was more
than a politician, the wide scope of his interests embracing,
besides the whole struggle of humanity against misery,
the application of science to tradition. The concluding
chapters of his Rights of Man, written, as we have seen,
in answer to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 447

Revolution, contained an outline of political economy that
embraced universal education, the abolition of poverty, a
reform of the criminal law, pensions for the aged, the re-
duction of armaments and international peace. His Age
of Reason which assailed the historic accuracy and the
validity of Biblical lore exalted science and reason as the
searchlights of truth. If the effects of these flaming thrusts
into the fabric of inherited authority were countered by
the reaction of Napoleon’s imperialism and the Catholic
restoration, they were not wholly lost in the Old World or
the New. Through England also, Americans drew French
doctrines, revamped by the various reformers who were
trying to reconstruct George III’s system in the spirit of
Mirabeau if not of Danton. Moreover, America gave an
asylum and an audience to English radicals, such as Priest-
ley and Cooper, who fled from conservative mobs and the
operation of penal sedition acts.

§

Under the impact of new forces—political and economic
revolution, the advance of science and invention, the ac-
cumulation of knowledge, and the blasts of foreign influ-
ence—the intellectual climate of the American republic
presented to the rising generation features essentially dif-
ferent from those of high significance in the colonial era.
By the secularizing political process and the march of scien-
tific skepticism, still deeper inroads were made into the
sovereignty of theology and mysticism, especially among
the educated classes.

In many circles of America, the trinitarian doctrine of
Christianity crumbled under two fires. On the part of the
theologians, particularly in New England, there went on
during the eighteenth century a continuous debate over the
traditional forms of Christian faith which eventuated in a
return to one of the primitive creeds, a widespread accept-
ance of the unitarian view of Christ’s teachings and mission.

448 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

After the outbreak of the American Revolution, the disinte-
gration of customary worship proceeded rapidly. In 1782,
King’s Chapel in Boston formally and officially declared
in favor of unitarianism. About the same time an English
tourist reported believers of that faith in all the cities he
visited, even in the village of Pittsburgh on the frontier.
At the opening of the nineteenth century, nearly every
Puritan preacher in Boston had deserted the trinitarian
views of his fathers. In 1803, William Ellery Channing,
on taking up his work in the Federal Street Church, defi-
nitely inaugurated the unitarian movement which finally
split the Congregational churches into two opposing camps.

From another quarter also, less theological in its interest,
criticism was poured upon the great structure of theology
bequeathed by the ancients and revised by the Lutherans,
Calvinists, Anglicans, and Puritans. While the theologians
themselves were being perplexed by dialectic difficulties,
men of science and laymen who undertook to defend and
advance that discipline were drifting steadily in the direc-
tion of Deism, a faith in one God derived not from a read-
ing of Christian creeds and professions but largely from a
study of nature and pagan literature.

Although the roots of this belief lay deep in the wisdom
of antiquity, it did not come into prominence in England
until early in the seventeenth century. By 1648, however,
the year in which death carried off Lord Herbert of Cher-
bury, “father of Deism,” the Deist movement was well
under way. After the profounder meaning of the Coperni-
can concept of the infinite universe had foliated in the minds
of students—especially after Newton crowned it with his
mechanistic view of the stellar system—a powerful group
of English thinkers entirely discarded from their thought
_ the God of the Old Testament and the cosmogony described
in the Book of Genesis and elaborated by John Milton.

Out of England Deism was borne to France by Voltaire,
where it became the creed of nearly all the skeptics who
labored at the Encyclopedia and at the new philosophy of

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 649

naturalism and humanity. From various directions the
doctrine came into America, spreading widely among the
intellectual leaders of the American Revolution and making
them doubly dangerous characters in the eyes of Anglican
Tories. When the crisis came, Jefferson, Paine, John
Adams, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and many lesser
lights were to be reckoned among either the Unitarians or
the Deists. It was not Cotton Mather’s God to whom
the authors of the Declaration of Independence appealed;
it was to ‘‘Nature’s God.”’ From whatever source derived,
the effect of both Unitarianism and Deism was to hasten
the retirement of historic theology from its empire over
the intellect of American leaders and to clear the atmos-
phere for secular interests.

Nevertheless at the very moment when Deism was play-
ing havoc with theological sovereignty there arrived from
England yet another religious movement more akin to
Edwards’ Great Awakening than to the spirit of Franklin,
Washington, and Jefferson. ‘The new faith was known as
Methodism and its founder, John Wesley, on his own
confession, was in some respects a disciple of Edwards.
Under another guise this movement represented the dis-
sidence of dissent, the leveling fervor which, as Burke re-
marked, had sharpened the antagonism between America
and the mother country, and was in the course of time to
furnish the inspiration for a nonconformist upheaval in
England.

By proposing to reduce somewhat the Anglican hierarchy
and to elevate the laity, Methodism added to the democracy
of the pew. In religion, it emphasized the salvation of the
individual by prayer and conversion. In morals, it waged
a Puritan-like war on dancing and frivolity in general while
it specifically exalted the virtues of industry and sobriety.
If the sermons and hymns of Methodism jarred on Jeffer-
son’s skeptical ears, its emphasis on self-expression as
against authority and its appeal to the humble as against
the mighty contributed to the swelling stream of mass con-

450 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

sciousness that made republicanism secure, beyond the possi-
bility of reaction.

The Peter the Hermit of this new gospel was Francis
Asbury, sent over in 1771 by Wesley to take charge of three
hundred brethren then in the New World. For forty-four
years this tireless missionary labored in the American vine.
yard, traveling more than two hundred and fifty thousand
miles through villages and towns, through thickly settled
country districts and dark frontier forests, claiming finally
three hundred thousand converts and four thousand or-
dained clergymen. ‘Though not a learned man, by constant
reading of the Bible, Asbury made himself master of all
its images, figures, and arguments that stir the emotions.
After the fashion of Jonathan Edwards, who set an awful
example, Asbury one moment frightened his flock by lurid
pictures of hell and the next thrilled it by visions of joy in
heaven.

Like Catholic missionaries, Methodists went straight to
the frontier, but unlike the Catholics they did not work
especially with the Indians or carry to them industrial and
decorative arts. On the contrary, they labored mainly with
people of their own race, to restrain the harshness and
brutality of the backwoods, to tame the hot passions of men
quick with the rifle and the dirk, to introduce sobriety into
communities terrified by drunken bullies. They built no
cathedrals or beautiful missions; they preached on stumps
and in barns.

When they found the Sermon on the Mount unavailing,
Methodists resorted to the horrors of hell and damnation,
shocking with their excesses that finicky English tourist,
Mrs. Trollope, who compared in loathing the noisy gospel
of the American frontier with the quiet decorum of village
churches in England where the vulgar never questioned the
dominion of squire and parson or ventured to dabble in
theological mysteries—forgetting in her critical attitude
toward the American democratic spirit that Methodism
was an English importation which, by whipping up the

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 451

emotions, happened to appeal to the untutored axmen of
the backwoods with the same appalling force as to the
neglected and despised miners and potters of Lancashire
and Staffordshire. If it lacked in the esthetic apprecia-
tion that adorns supported and contented leisure, it ap-
pealed intensely to the dawning consciousness of the hewers
of wood and drawers of water who were to count heavily
in the conquest and government of this continent. Though
English in origin, the Methodist organization became more
rooted in American soil than the Episcopalian Church;
Methodists had brethren and sisters in England but they
had no lingering traditions binding them to the primate at
Canterbury. .
§

While Methodism swept thousands of converts into its
fold and defied advancing Deism, it did not turn back the
irresistible current of natural science that had been gather-
ing momentum since the age of Bacon and Descartes.
Indeed, next to the great political experiment, the growth
of scientific interest was perhaps the outstanding feature of
cultural life in the early republic.

Some of the men who had contributed to the development
of that subject in colonial times lived on into the new epoch
to enlarge their discipline under novel conditions. Franklin,
full of years and great in honors, saw Washington’s admin-
istration inaugurated before he passed from the scene. His
colleague, Benjamin Rush, continued his work for nearly
four decades after the Declaration of Independence, win-
ning from the King of Prussia and the Tsar of Russia ofh-
cial recognition for his contributions to medical knowledge.

From England came two ardent apostles of science,
whose labors in America strengthened the cause so dear to
Franklin’s heart. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen,
who shared honors in chemistry with Lavoisier, found
shelter in Pennsylvania from persecutions at home and
carried on his researches there until his death in 1804. The

452 THE RISE'\OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

other refugee from oppressive laws, Thomas Cooper, ar-
rived in 1795 and for forty-five years labored at chemistry,
mineralogy, geology, and political economy, combining
disputes with the theologians over ‘‘the authenticity of the
Pentateuch” and equally bitter controversies with Fed-
eralist politicians over policies of government. Arrested
and fined under the Sedition Act of a New World after
he had fled from one in the Old, driven out of Virginia
University by religious critics, he preached science in South
Carolina College until he was finally forced into retirement
by his clerical foes.

In the meantime a new generation of men was carrying
forward the scientific inheritance and adding to its data and
theories. Nathaniel Bowditch, Massachusetts mathema-
tician, brought out in 1802 the American Practical Navi-
gator and a few years later undertook the task of trans-
lating Laplace’s Mécanique céleste into English. At Yale,
in 1805, Benjamin Silliman gave his first regular course
on chemistry, opening a career that was rich in achievement
and distinction. Seven years afterward, far away on the
banks of the Ohio, John James Audubon, a native of New
Orleans, began the labors that were to make him the pre-
mier ornithologist of his age. In 1815, Constantine
Rafinesque, of Franco-German parentage, published at
Philadelphia the first part of his extensive work on botany
—early fruits of inquiries by a curious genius who was in
his later days to startle his contemporaries by declaring
that “‘new species and new genera are continually produced
by derivation from existing forms,’ foreshadowing the
epoch-making proclamation of Charles Darwin in the next

generation.
All over the country in fact, in colleges, libraries, and

amateur laboratories, a restless searching for the secrets
of nature was being prosecuted with energy and intelli-
gence. The great Lewis and Clark expedition from St.
Louis to the Oregon coast in 1803-06 was more than a
path-breaking enterprise; it was a scientific undertaking of

WHE YOUNG, REPUBLIC 453

high importance. If none of the American scientists ap-
proached in magnitude the giants of the Old World, they
at least made a profound impression on the intellectual
life of America.

Moreover, the practical men among them—Whit-
ney, Fulton, Stevens, and Fitch, for example—were
true sons of the age that gave Watt, Arkwright, and
Crompton to the western world. Two revolutionary inven-
tions belong to the early republic: the cotton gin patented
under Washington’s administration and the steamboat
launched as a commercial success during the presidency of
Jefferson.

By codperative effort the inventive genius of isolated
individuals was stimulated and supplemented. ‘The Amer-
ican Philosophical Society, founded in colonial times, as
we have seen, took on new life after the Revolution.
Gathering into its fold members from all parts of America
and indeed of western civilization, it began to issue publica-
tions to disseminate the results of research; and, since its
program included almost everything from mechanical in-
ventions to experiments that “‘let light into the nature of
things,” its range was wide enough to embrace the many
scientific interests of the day from archeology to aero-
nautics. Practically all the distinguished Frenchmen who
came to America as ministers, travelers, or exiles during the
early republican era were admitted to the Society and the
custom of enrolling the leaders of European science was con-
tinued, several of the Americans in turn being honored by
membership in European academies. At the sessions of the
American Philosophical Society, all the scientific questions
which occupied the thought of the Old World and the New
were seriously debated. It could be truly said that no
modern speculation or problem discussed by the savants of
Europe escaped the scrutiny of the Academy at Philadelphia
—that lively center which inspired the formation of similar
bodies and special associations in every part of the United
States. ’

454 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Meanwhile, the industrial arts were advanced in another
quarter by associations of merchants and mechanics who
formed institutes, founded libraries, and promoted research
for new ideas and designs. Among these unions of citizens,
for example, was the Pennsylvania Society for the Encour-
agement of Manufactures and Useful Arts, which in 1792
began to stimulate talent in America by offering premiums
for the best pottery, china, and other articles of utility.
Bonuses were held out as prizes to English craftsmen who
would bring over, in defiance of the official orders, drawings
and models of the new machines which were making their
country the workshop of the world. The spirit of the age
was unmistakable: master nature, make her subserve human
comfort, and accumulate wealth from the process.

§

In the humanistic sciences, the great note of the age was
the idea of progress which now secured a widening empire
over the minds of those who reflected on the destiny and
duty of mankind. That concept, especially as it flowered in
the speculations of Chastellux and Condorcet, had a close
relation to, and a deep significance for, the republic in
America. Owing to the absence of a priestly monopoly
over learning, the relative fluidity of classes, and the exist-
ence of immense material resources, conditions in the
United States were peculiarly favorable to the application
of the theory. In America at least it seemed possible to
lift the dream from the realm of speculation and give it
effect in the common life of the masses.

This hope inspired Condorcet when, in the shadow of
death cast by the tyranny of the French extremists, he
wrote, in 1793, the immortal Esquisse d’un tableau his-
torique des progres de l’esprit humain, an outline of the
history of progress and a forecast of its impetuous sway
over the illimitable future. Into this gigantic pattern Con-
dorcet fitted the American Revolution as the great event

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 455

of the modern world which was to set in train the dynamic
of a new epoch. ‘In consequence of America declaring
herself independent of the British government,” he said,
‘‘a war ensued between the two enlightened nations, in
which one contended for the natural rights of mankind, the
other for the impious doctrine that subjects these rights to
prescription, to political interests, and written constitutions.
The great cause at issue was tried, during the war, in the
tribunal of opinion, and as it were before the assembled
nations of mankind. The rights of men were freely investi-
gated and strenuously supported in the writings which cir-
culated from the banks of the Neva to those of the Gua-
dalquivir. . . . These discussions penetrated into the most
distant and retired hamlets. . . . In this state of things,
it could not be long before the trans-Atlantic revolution
must find its imitators in the European quarter of the
world.”

The very next year after Condorcet’s sketch of progress
was printed, namely, in 1796, a beautiful translation was
issued in Philadelphia, rapidly spreading the fame and
philosophy of the author through the intellectual circles of
America. Coming as it did swiftly upon the publication
of Chastellux’s observations on American civilization and
its probable destiny, Condorcet’s volume gave wide currency
to the notion that America might realize a grand ideal for
the subjugation of the material world to human welfare.

Beyond all question Franklin, who knew the Ency-
clopedists and Condorcet, early saw the import for Amer-
ica of natural science and the concept of progress. Indeed,
fifteen years before Condorcet’s sketch of universal pros-
perity was published, Franklin wrote from the American
legation in France to Priestley, the English chemist: ‘‘It is
impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried,
in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We
may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity
and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy trans-
port. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its

456 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or
cured, not excepting that of old age, and our lives length-
ened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.
O that moral science were in a fair way of improvement,
that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that
human beings would at length learn what they now im-
properly call humanity!’’ Sir Humphrey Davy spoke with
full knowledge when he said that Franklin ‘‘has in no
instance exhibited that false dignity, by which philosophy
is kept aloof from common applications; and he has sought
rather to make her a useful inmate and servant in the com-
mon habitations of man, than to preserve her merely as an
object of adoration in temples and palaces.”

When Franklin died, the mantle of intellectual leader-
ship fell upon Jefferson. As his letters and his great library
showed, he too was thoroughly conversant with the latest
advances of natural science and with the idea of progress
overriding philosophies of apathetic or stoical resignation
to fate; he was constantly meditating upon their meaning
for the order of society just established in republican
America. On surveying the ground after he laid down
public office, he expressed to John Adams his conviction
that ‘‘one of the questions . . . on which our parties took
different sides, was on the improvability of the human mind
in science, in ethics, in government, &c. Those who advo-
cated a reformation of institutions, pari passu with the
progress of science, maintained that no definite limits could
be assigned to progress. ‘The enemies of reform on the
other hand denied improvement and advocated steady ad-
herence to the principles, practices, and institutions of our
fathers which they represented as the consummation of
wisdom and the acme of excellence beyond which the human
mind could never advance.’ ‘There was the key to Jefter-
son’s concept of social evolution.

Appealing especially to the third and fourth economic
strata of the American social order, namely, the yeomanry
and mechanics, Jefferson was the natural leader of a human-

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 457

istic democracy. ‘Though himself a planter, he was of
yeoman origin. Cutting loose from English patterns of
reputability, he came to the conclusion that public felicity
was the goal of statecraft. Reviving Roman doctrines, he
held that the idea of a republic was something dignified and
grand in itself, a noble expression of human nature, and
he grew still more democratic as the years went by. As we
have seen, Jefferson started early on his program for real-
izing an individualistic society: destroying primogeniture as
the bulwark of the Virginia aristocracy, disestablishing the
church in Virginia, promoting freedom of the press and
religious worship, eliminating cruelties and superstitions
from the laws, advancing free schools and institutions of
higher learning, forwarding the study of theoretical and
applied science, and extending the knowledge of modern
languages as the key to modern wisdom. |

In the course of time Jefferson worked out a fairly com-
prehensive scheme of social science: agriculture should
be the economic basis of society; a mild and inexpensive
government given to toleration and justice could easily
maintain order; an equal division of inheritances and easy
acquisition of land would make for a practical equality in
status; universal education would afford talents for leader-
ship and give all the people an equal opportunity to get
at the wisdom of the ages; immigration should be limited
to assimilable stocks and overpopulation avoided; slavery
should be abolished and the slaves transported to a land
of their own. ‘Thus could America realize in some measure
at least the dream of a golden age and move to better
things with the advance of knowledge. Whatever criti-
cism might be brought against Jefferson’s creed, it had the
merit of concreteness and humanism; and, contrasted with
the colonial order, was certainly revolutionary from begin-
ning to end.

Against such social theories, as well as against Jefferson’s
political leadership, was aligned, as he said himself, a party
that denied the doctrine of human improvement, clung to

458 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

theological authority, and sought safety in traditional cus-
toms. As a matter of fact there was enough left of the
old arrangement of classes and their psychology to give a
specious appeal to the prospect of retaining most of the
colonial heritage. When the grave consequences of the
Revolution, both actual and impending, were fairly grasped,
a party of cultural propriety was formed. Its nucleus was
made up of the wealthier families from the second colonial
stratum which had come to the top in the upheaval.
Grouped around this core were the new families enriched
during the war by speculation, privateering, confiscations,
expropriations, and various forms of legitimate business en-
terprise. Closely associated with these orders were the
old loyalists who had never accepted the Revolution but,
while hating it in their hearts, had remained in America
and weathered the storm.

Although, in promoting capitalistic undertakings, this
party, by one of the twists of fortune, was more revolu-
tionary in the realm of fact than Jefferson himself, in ideas
and manners it strove with almost pathetic anguish to
gather up the floating timbers of colonial wreckage.
Remembering with regret the pomp and circumstance of
the provincial capitals, it tried to make the republic socially
respectable, surround the President with glitter and cere-
mony, maintain the powdered wigs, silken hose, and servile
livery of the grand style. Without much difficulty this
party persuaded Washington to assume some signs of royal
dignity, thereby offending those who professed leveling
principles. When he went about the capital city on official
business, he rode in a fine coach drawn by four horses,
making quite a regal appearance. When he and Mrs.
Washington gave a ball, the social set tried to envelop them
with the style of a royal couple. Perhaps recalling snubs
received from ‘the English set in Boston, John Adams
now thought that the head of the nation should have
an impressive title such as ‘‘His Majesty, the President”;
while ladies with claims to heraldic devices similarly dubious

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 459

would have addressed his consort at the Republican Court
as “‘Lady Washington.”

After all, this was natural enough, for Washington was
indeed a majestic figure compared with the lumbering
“Farmer George” who ruled England, and titles of some
kind had been cherished by every type of human society
since the first primitive chief rose above his fellows. More-
over, if we leave out of account some bucolic members of
Congress, the executive, legislative, and judicial authorities
of the first government were gentlemen born and bred; so
the installation of royal ceremony would not have been as
incongruous as it seems at this distance. Furthermore,
polished ministers and their ladies from European courts
and distinguished visitors, such as Talleyrand, Duc de la
Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Louis Philippe, future King
of France, bringing an atmosphere of reputable custom to
the American scene, stimulated by their very presence a
desire for emulation.

Although the Jeffersonians laughed heartily at the airs
of the daughter of a Philadelphia speculator who married
into the English aristocracy and learned to swear and tell
malodorous stories with the savoir faire of a duchess, there
was no doubt about the rigidity of the class lines which sepa-
rated the party of wealth and talents from the party of
farmers and mechanics. During the last days of Jefferson’s
service as Secretary of State, only three of the “best” fami-
lies of Philadelphia, then the national capital, deigned to
invite to their homes that delightful raconteur, musician,
and critic of the fine arts. Once when Mrs. Washington
discovered a spot on her immaculate drawing room wall just
above a sofa, she reproached her niece with entertaining
‘a filthy democrat.”

In a similar spirit, Federalist Boston read out of polite
society Republican leaders, such as Elbridge Gerry, and
later even John Quincy Adams when he went over to the
Jeffersonian party. In the city of Samuel Adams, regarded
by the English as a low demagogue, it became impossible

460 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

for a member of the strict political sect to dance or drink
wine with a “‘Jacobin.”” In fact it was as difficult for a
reputable Federalist to associate with a Jeffersonian Demo-
crat of the early republican age as for a denizen of Fifth
Avenue in the era of William McKinley to drink tea with a
disciple of John P. Altgeld or Eugene V. Debs.

If, as most modern historians agree, there was no large
monarchist contingent in this party of propriety, it cer-
tainly contained a very considerable proportion of people
who felt that the strength of their order and its culture
depended on close relations with England and that the out-
come of the whole republican experiment was at least
doubtful. In the year of the peace with England—that is,
in 1783—the London Chronicle published a letter from
Charleston setting forth the prevailing note in the circle of
conventional hopes: ‘“The wise and moderate part of the
inhabitants here look back upon their late situation, when
connected with Great Britain, with infinite regret and con-
sider the peace, the security, the brotherly regard, and the
state of visible improvement which they enjoyed under the
protection of the mother country as the true Golden Age
of America.” Just after the adoption of the Constitution
in 1788, another Chronicle correspondent, this time from
the center of things, in Philadelphia, while reporting some
economic improvement, recorded with pleasure that John
Adams had “demonstrated the absurdity of democracy”
and abated much of the aversion to monarchy, adding that

‘St would not surprise many were the United States a mon-
archy early in the next century.”

This sentiment was shortly confirmed by Jonathan |
Boucher, the celebrated Anglican clergyman, a refugee
from the American Revolution, who in 1797 brought out
a volume of his sermons prefaced by a note on the lament-
able result of the recent uprising in America. With the -
dialectic artistry of his craft, he argued that the United
States was founded on false democratic principles; that
it had started the horrible French Revolution and would be

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 461

shaken down by it; that it would finally become a great
empire under a monarch. Culturally, Boucher declared the
experiment a complete failure since it owed all the arts,
sciences, and other good things to England. Quoting a
writer of his school, he exclaimed: ‘‘What has America
to boast of ? What are the graces or the virtues that dis-
tinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war
or their inventions in peace? Inglorious soldiers, yet se-
ditious citizens! Sordid merchants and indolent usurers.”’
In the circumstances, the only remedy that the disturbed
clergyman could concoct was a permanent alliance of the
United States with Great Britain. Though this party of
historic propriety, eager to beat back the rising tide of
Jefferson’s humanistic democracy, was destined to be out-
voted at the polls, it possessed enough wealth and power
to furnish solid substance for a social development along
conventional lines.
§

The shock of the Revolution, the struggles to uphold the
independent republic that had been forced upon the people
by the accidents of fortune, and the contests of parties over
the possession and direction of the national government
awakened unexpected creative forces in imaginative litera-
ture and art. As in every age of intellectual activity, the
operation and flowering of those energies were contingent
in a large measure upon the character of their patronage
—itself now a complex of economic factors—the nature
of the conflicts within the social order, and the dominant
features of the spiritual climate in general. Thus con-
ditioned, the product of American vitalism during this era
was rich and varied. In its highest forms it was marked
by power and distinction. If much of the writing was stilted
and bombastic, those faults could be attributed in no small
measure to reverence for English and classical models.

Letters and art, as in any other order, had to be sus-
tained under the republic by dollars and cents. Tradition-.

462 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ally the support for literature had come mainly from royal,
princely, and ecclesiastical sources, supplemented later by
subscriptions from members of the landed and mercantile
classes; while art and architecture had been fostered by
kings, lords, prelates, gentlemen, and merchants who
bought the products of the painters and the designers.
The theater which Goethe directed at Weimar, like most
of the great theaters on the Continent, depended largely
upon princely bounty. If the Crown in England did not
underwrite the stage or provide a royal opera house, it did
patronize artists, actors, musicians, and authors by means
of commissions, grants, and pensions. Voltaire’s Henriade,
which appeared in England in 1728, was subsidized by three
hundred and forty-four subscribers, headed by the king, the
queen, and noblemen of the court, and it was dedicated
in a grand style to Queen Caroline, who gave him a goodly
purse.

In republican America there were no kings, princes,
queens, or prelates to maintain letters and the arts. Here
the makers of imaginative literature were supported by
plain civilians who bought books, magazines, and theater
tickets. Although the question of government subvention
for the theater was raised in a debate in the Pennsylvania
legislature and a few persons advocated official subsidy and
control in republican interests, the idea bore no fruit. The
drama like the novel and poetry had, therefore, to rest
upon popular enthusiasm and purchasing power. Art and
architecture bowed to the decrees of merchants and landed
proprietors who had surplus incomes to spend. Dairy maids
and hired men, as a contemporary remarked, could buy the
hair-raising stories of the novelists, but they could not buy
oil paintings, town houses, or mansions in the country.
Neither were they holders of front pews in the congrega-
tions that built new churches or voters for legislatures that
ordered the state capitols. But each group—the high and
the low—found its servants; each was soon offered wares
to fit its tastes.

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 463

Since there were then few Americans who combined
riches with esthetic talents and hence could withdraw from
the world of reality to indulge in their dreams, the litera-
ture and art of the republican era inevitably bore the im-
press of the social and political struggles that went on
among the patrons. Writers and artists, living in the
world of fact, could not escape the ‘Sturm und Drang”’ that
raged about them. And the war for independence had
left a legacy of emotions. Basically a certain dislike of
Britain and things British was unavoidable among the
patriots, especially as the clash with the mother country
continued long after the treaty of peace was signed.
Of kindred necessity a consciousness of national. inde-
pendence and of the challenge which responsibility carried
with it forced upward feelings of belligerence and pride.
By analogous processes, interest and affection were turned
in the direction of France, the great ally in the war for
liberty.

At the same time within American society, as we have
already indicated, was being waged a spirited battle between
capitalistic forces on the one hand and agrarians led by
planters on the other—a contest in which the Federalist
party, drawing its sustenance mainly from the commercial
orders, was thrown back upon traditional ideas in meeting
the attacks of Jeffersonian hordes. Since it also in-
cluded in its ranks most of the old Tories who looked with
tearful eyes upon the past that lay buried under the ruins
of the Revolution, English writers, classical and contem-
porary, and English actors and artists could satisfy nearly
all the desires of those who longed poignantly for order,
for calm, and for prostration. In the circumstances, there-
fore, most of the creative writers in the realm of imagina-
tive letters, during the early republican period, showed a
tendency to drift to the Jeffersonian left.

The immediate environment in which these writers and
artists worked presented striking features that could not
escape the attention of any observer—features essentially

464 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

rationalistic, practical, scientific. and humane, with far-
reaching implications that touched all elements of the social
fabric and its functions. In concrete terms the historic
rights of Englishmen, of which colonial America had.
boasted, meant privileges for merchants and freeholders;
whereas the rights of man accorded by nature, in logical
requirement at least, embraced privileges for disfranchised
mechanics, subject women, indentured servants, and even
slaves. At all events, the volcanic awakening of the masses
which accompanied the Revolution and the fierce partisan
battles that followed it were patent facts standing out
vividly in the American scene.

Less ponderable, but undeniable, was a new social
spirit, calling for prison reform and the abolition of slavery,
which was making advances in the land: it was being dis-
cussed in the closets of philosophers; it was destined to re-
write, in blood, as time proved, whole chapters of the
law. And as radical interpreters would have it, the rights
of man really included rights of women too. Mary Woll-
stonecraft’s startling challenge to masculine supremacy,
published in 1792 was as portentous in one sphere as
Rousseau’s social contract in another. Finally, the intel-
lectual climate of the new age was secular and earthly.

No one could read the current books that flowed from
the press in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the
United States—and the intellectual life of the republican
age embraced all those countries as parts of a common
civilization—without discovering waves of reform beating
against the traditional headlands. If writers in America
could agree on the necessity of sustaining the republican
idea, they displayed on other matters shades of opinion
that lay far to the left of the “high toned” doctrines
espoused by Hamilton and John Adams. In any case they
bore the striations of the social drift.

§

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 465

It was natural that the republican writers should seek
to make the drama an instrument to express their interests
and philosophy. In the confusion of the war for independ-
ence, of course, the theater, which had grown up in a desul-
tory fashion after its initial appearance at the opening of
the eighteenth century, had suffered a serious setback except
in New York, where the British used it for their own pur-
poses, during their occupation of the city. Indeed, the Con-
tinental Congress, much to the satisfaction of the Puritans,
had in 1774 advised all the states to ‘“‘discountenance and
discourage all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock
fighting, exhibitions of shows, plays and other expensive
diversions and entertainments.” It seems that the request
was granted with more enthusiasm than calls for money and
troops.

But as soon as peace came, the strain was relaxed. Even
in Boston the ice then began to crack; throughout Massa-
chusetts, where stage plays had been forbidden by an act
of the General Court in 1750, the Revolution and the new
secularism had set opinions afloat. By 1791, things had
reached such a point that a number of respectable citizens,
horrifying Samuel Adams and some of the saints, peti-
tioned for a repeal of the law. ‘The proposal was de-
feated but, undismayed by the stern aspect of jurispru-
dence, a troop of comedians visited Boston the very next
year, rented a stable, erected a platform, and announced, as
a disguise, a series of ‘‘moral lectures.”’

Unhappily for the players, the news was too good to
keep and early in December the sheriff swooped down
upon a “moral” performance of The School for Scandal.
In the foray, one of the actors was arrested and a test case
was made while the town rocked with excitement. Since
crowds wanted to see and hear the Thespians, the trial
was held in that citadel of liberty, Faneuil Hall. Then,
to the consternation of the good, a clever trick of the de-
fending counsel forced the acquittal of the wicked one
amid a storm of applause. From that time forward

466 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

theatrical performances were freely advertised and given
in the stronghold of Cotton Mather.

While the rising generation was reading and reciting
comedies and tragedies, while even the children of Puri-
tans were attending the ‘‘Devil’s Chapel,” as stern old Doc-
tor Tillotson called the play house, American writers were
arguing that the theater could be made to serve the cause
of the young republic. Indeed, one of the most effective
replies to Tory dramatic propaganda was made by Mrs.
Mercy Warren in the form of a satirical play, entitled
The Group, written in 1775. Whether her product was
actually put on the beards is not known but the publisher
claimed that it had been ‘“‘lately acted’? and was to be
“reacted to the Wonder of all Superior Intelligences Nigh
Headquarters at Amboyne.” If there were some short-
comings in Mrs. Warren’s style, there was no weakness
in the patriotism which inspired her answers to the attacks
of General Burgoyne and other “military Thespians” from
England. With a similar confidence in American destiny,
William Dunlap, who may justly be called the ‘‘father of
the American theater,” championed the drama on the
ground that it could be made an engine for the support of
the republic and the improvement of the social order.

On this point, however, there was much difference of
opinion. In the debate on the subject, in 1785, in the
Pennsylvania legislature, the contestants divided rather
sharply according to their political views, the party of
“the rich and well-born”’ lending support to the theater and
the party of leveling agrarian democracy taking the
other side of the question. Robert Morris declared him-
self a friend of the theater as offering a rational, instruc-
tive amusement—an institution that had improved public
manners, given opportunity to genius, afforded lessons to
vice and folly—and expressed the hope that in due time
American poets would be writing dramas adapted to the
circumstances of American life. George Clymer, one of
the richest men in Philadelphia and, like Morris, a member

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 467

of the constitutional convention of 1787, after declaring
that no civilized state was without a theater, inquired:
‘‘Are we forever to be indebted to other nations for genius,
wit, and refinement ?”’

Against these apostles of Hamilton’s Federalism were
arrayed two farmers from the frontier who were to vote
against the ratification of the Constitution in the Pennsy]l-
vania convention. One, John Smiley, thought that the
drama would divert the people from their political duties,
that Cardinal Mazarin had established the French Acad-
emy for that sinister purpose, and that the fine arts ‘‘only
flourished when states were on the decline.” ‘The other,
William Findley, likewise a vigorous opponent of the Ham-
iltonian liturgy, was equally doctrinaire; in his opinion a
government-regulated theater would be a dangerous tool,
while a free theater would vitiate arcadian taste. Al-
though in the end the project for a theater supported and
censored by the state was defeated, it did not mean that in
Pennsylvania or anywhere else the drama escaped the im-
pacts of contemporary politics.

On the contrary, the writers of American plays, in keep-
ing with their political professions, deliberately sought to
strike the republican note; and after the battle began to
rage between Hamilton and Jefferson, they breathed into
their lines the animus of the partisan conflict. The second
American play given on a regular stage by professional
actors, it seems, Royall Tyler’s comedy, The Contrast, pro-
duced in New York in 1787, represented a yeoman’s reac-
tion to the manners and customs of a selfish and luxurious
urban society. In this satire, a patriot soldier, Colonel
Manly, embodied pride in American independence; a Yan-
kee servant stood for contentment with ‘“‘twenty acres of
rock, the Bible, the cow, Tabitha, and a little peaceable
bundling’’; while the offspring of profiteering families from
the city represented the foibles and outlook of the smart set
contemptuous of arcadian democracy.

To the drift of the argument the prologue gives the cue:

468 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Exult, each patriot heart!—This night is shewn
A piece, which we may fairly call our own;
Where the proud titles of ““My Lord! Your Grace!”
To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.

Our Author pictures not from foreign climes
The fashions or the follies of the times;

But has confin’d the subject of his work

To the gay scenes—the circles of New York.

On native themes his Muse displays her pow’rs;
If ours the faults, the virtues too are ours.
Why should our thoughts to distant countries roam,
When each refinement may be found at home?
Who travels now to ape the rich or great,

To deck an equipage and roll in state;

To court the graces, or to dance with ease,

Or by hypocrisy to strive to please?

Our free-born ancestors such arts despis’d;
Genuine sincerity alone they priz’d;

Their minds with honest emulation fir’d,

To solid good—not ornament—aspir’d;

Or, if ambition rous’d a bolder flame,

Stern virtue throve, where indolence was shame.

But modern youths, with imitative sense

Deem taste in dress the proof of excellence;
And spurn the meanness of your homespun arts,
Since homespun habits would obscure their parts;
Whilst all, which aims at splendour and parade,
Must come from Europe and be ready made.

Should rigid critics reprobate our play,
At least the patriotic heart will say,
“Glorious our fall, since in a noble cause.
The bold attempt alone demands applause.”

Thus does our Author to your candour trust;
Conscious, the free are generous, as just!

In the course of the play the hero celebrated republican
simplicity, decried luxury, praised the glories of Greece in
her early career when her people knew “‘no other tool than
the ax and the saw.”’ Expressing doctrines akin to those of
Daniel Shays, the Yankee Jonathan boasted that “we
don’t make any great matter of distinction in our state be-

LAE YOUNG’ REPUBLIC 469

tween quality and other folks.”” In contrast the gay young
lady—the flapper of New York in the century that was pass-
ing—laughed at the old-fashioned morals thus revived,
declaring that money was one of the chief objects of matri-
mony, that she could bring more beaux to her feet by “‘one
flirt of this hoop” than by sighing any fine sentiments.

In the end, however, republican virtue triumphed. ‘The
“snob” of the play took his leave with a remark about the
superiority of his imported Chesterfieldian finish while the
hero exclaimed: ‘‘I have learned that probity, virtue, honor,
though they should not have received the polish of Europe
will secure to an honest American the good graces of his
fair countrywoman, and I hope the applause of The
Publicy,

Two years after Tyler’s comedy appeared in New York,
William Dunlap’s play, The Father, was produced, open-
ing his career as the dominant figure in republican dramatics.
Born in New Jersey, Dunlap was a native American.
Nevertheless he was catholic in his interests and tastes,
broad in his knowledge of foreign tongues and literatures,
and deeply appreciative of older civilizations. He was a
prodigious worker, writing in all about fifty plays, ranging
from tragedy to comedy and from interlude to opera.
More than half of these were original productions; the
remainder were translations or adaptations from French
and German works.

Besides this, Dunlap studied painting with Benjamin
West and brought the sister art to work in close alliance
with the drama. So extravagant, indeed, was his taste for
great spectacles that he seems to be the originator of that
conspicuously American type of production—the gorgeous
show making a lavish display of wealth and material goods.
His versatile labors Dunlap crowned by writing a history
of the American theater.

In the American themes handled in his plays, Dunlap
consciously mirrored the aspirations of the idealists around
him—"“‘liberty, science, peace, plenty, my country,” as he

470 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

expressed it. The Father presented in 1789 caught up the
refrain of The Contrast, which had captivated the people.
Especially did his drama, André, enter into the spirit of the
Revolution and of the optimists who believed that the
republic was about to fulfill the age-long hope of mankind
for utopia.

While unfolding the story, Dunlap made one of his
characters, M’Donald, a soldier in the field, give an eff-
cient cause for the Revolution:

As to ourselves, in truth, I nothing see,

In all the wondrous deeds which we perform,
But plain effects from causes full as plain.

Rises not man forever ’gainst oppression?

It is the law of life; he can’t avoid it.

But when the love of property unites

With sense of injuries past, and dread of future,
Is it then wonderful, that he should brave

A lesser evil to avoid a greater?

Yet when a companion in arms, Seward, asked him:
“Ffast thou no nobler motives for thy arms than love of
property and thirst for vengeance?’ M’Donald replied:

Yes, my good Seward, and yet nothing wondrous.

I love this country for the sake of man.

My parents, and I thank them, cross’d the seas,
And made me native of fair Nature’s world,

With room to grow and thrive in. I have thriven;
And feel my mind unshackled, free, expanding,
Grasping, with ken unbounded, mighty thoughts,

At which, if chance my mother had, good dame,

In Scotia, our revered parent soil,

Given me to see the day, I should have shrunk
Affrighted. Now I see in this new world

A resting spot for man, if he can stand

Firm in his place, while Europe howls around him.

Moved by the nobler strain Seward exclaimed:

Then might, perhaps, one land on earth be found,
Free from th’ extremes of poverty and riches;
Where ne’er a scepter’d tyrant should be known,
Or tyrant lordling, curses of creation.

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 471

To the land thus blessed with liberty, peace, and plenty
were to be added, however, the finest products of European
civilization.

From Europe shall enriching commerce flow,

And many an ill attendant; but from thence

Shall likewise flow blest Science; Europe’s knowledge,

By sharp experience bought, we should appropriate;

Striving thus to leap from that simplicity,

With ignorance curst, to that simplicity

By knowledge blest; unknown the gulf between.

When his companion who had listened patiently to this out-
burst cried, ‘‘Dreams, Dreams!” M’Donald brought the
vision to an end with the words:

I'll to my bed, for I have watch’d all night;

And may my sleep give pleasing repetition

Of these my waking dreams! Virtue’s incentives.

In such themes and in such lines did Dunlap seek to
realize his project for using the stage as an instrument to
disseminate the ideals of the young republic, improve taste,
and elevate morals.

Among Dunlap’s contemporaries were two dramatists
who went completely over to the Jeffersonian left, boasted
of the name Democrat, participated in politics, and openly
expressed their judgment on the merits of the contending
parties. ‘The first of these, James N. Barker, combined
ofice-holding under Republican auspices with his literary
labors and tried to express, in terms of Jeffersonian philos-
ophy, “‘the genius of America, science, liberty, and attend-
ant spirits.”

The second, Mordecai Noah, while discovering the limi-
tations of his art in American conditions, with similar
vision freely accepted the restraints imposed upon him by
the society in which he worked. ‘‘My line, as you well
know,” he said in a letter to Dunlap, ‘‘has been in the more
rugged paths of politics, a line in which there is more fact
than poetry, more feeling than fiction; in which to be sure,

472 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

there are ‘exits’ and ‘entrances’—where the ‘prompter’s
whistle’ is constantly heard in the voice of the people; but
which in our popular government, almost disqualifies us
for the more soft and agreeable translation to the lofty
conceptions of tragedy, the pure diction of genteel com-
edy, or the wit, gaiety, and humor of broad farce.”

It was indeed those very irksome trammels that drove
Noah’s distinguished countryman, John Howard Payne,
to develop his dramatic art abroad in more traditional
themes, such as Brutus and Charles II. If his song, Home
Sweet Home, by which he is remembered, recalled the land
of his birth, Americans took note of the fact that it was
sung for the first time in London, in 1823, after Payne had
lived in England for many years.

§

Like the dramatists, the novelists of the early republic
also worked in the realism of existing facts and conditions.
They too arranged themselves according to their sympa-
thies with the tendencies of their age. On the right, al-
though a champion of republican simplicity, was Royall
Tyler, a son of Boston, a graduate of Harvard, a soldier
in the army that suppressed Shays’ agrarian rebellion, a
producer of fiction as well as a writer of plays. Ina novel
called The Algerian Captive, published in 1797, he gently
surveyed and satirized all American society, displaying in
the operation both skill and insight.

While Tyler laughed a little at that “certain staple of
New England . . . called conscience,’ at the hard the-
ology of his ancestors, the ingenuities of spinsters, and
the quackeries of doctors, he bore down heaviest on points
that irked the party of Thomas Jefferson. He laughed
loudest at the itinerant doctors who were ‘‘especially good
at mending a kettle and a constitution.”” He obviously en-
joyed taking a shot at paper money, at Voltaire, d’Alem-
bert, and Diderot, at “light anti-federal sermons,” and

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 473

at the hard-drinking and fox-hunting Jeffersonian gentry of
the South. He grew positively exuberant in describing a
Virginia parson who came late into his pulpit, red in the
face from beating a Negro boy who had delayed his arrival
by negligence, and then preached ‘‘an animated discourse of
eleven minutes on the practical duties of religion.” Ina
parting volley, Tyler remarked that the clergyman was ‘‘as
much respected upon the turf as upon the hassock.”’

If many a hearty Federalist laughed over Tyler’s thrusts
at foibles on the opposite side of the political fence, the
spiritual heirs of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards
in New England must have wept over the secular note of
his novel. It was too strong in its wit to be missed. Lest
it be overlooked, however, by the careless, Tyler explained
in his preface that he was contributing a native product
to satisfy the growing interest of the masses in tales of
fancy.

By way of reinforcement, he made his hero describe at
length the change in popular taste that had ‘taken place
during a few years of his absence from home: ‘‘When hé
left New England, books of Biography, Travels, Novels,
and Modern Romances were confined to our seaports; or,
if known in the country, were read only in the families of
Clergymen, Physicians, and Lawyers; while certain funeral
discourses, the last words and dying speeches of Bryan
Shaheen, and Levi Ames, and some dreary somebody’s
Day of Doom formed the most diverting part of the
farmer’s library. On his return from captivity he found
a surprising alteration in the public taste. In our inland
towns of consequence social libraries had been instituted,
composed of books designed to amuse rather than to in-
struct. . . . All orders of country life, with one accord,
forsook the sober sermons and Practical Pieties of their
fathers for the gay stories and splendid impieties of the
Traveller and the Novelist. The worthy farmer no longer
fatigued himself with Bunyan’s Pilgrim up ‘the hill of diffi-
culty’ or through the ‘slough of despond’ but quaffed wine

474 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

with Brydone in the hermitage of Vesuvius, or sported with
Bruce on the fairy land of Abyssinia: while Dolly, the
Dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man, threw aside the
ballad of the cruel stepmother, over which they had so often
wept in concert and now amused themselves into so agree-
able a terrour, with the haunted houses and hobgobblins of
Mrs. Ratcliffe, that they were both afraid to sleep alone.”

A few degrees to the left of Tyler, but yet no leveling
democrat, was a disciple of Jefferson from western Penn-
sylvania, Hugh Brackenridge, whose novel, Model Chivy-
alry, laid bare the anatomy of American politics in an imi-
tation of Cervantes. Brackenridge was a lawyer who had
developed a large practice among the farmers of the Pitts-
burgh region and shared some of the frontiersman’s antip-
athy for Hamilton’s high-toned government. In a satiri-
cal vein he belittled the Society of the Cincinnati, that pow-
erful aid of the Federalist faction.

In a true agrarian spirit, lawyers were made the enemies
of the people. ‘They have so much jargon,” said the hero
of the tale, ‘that the devil himself cannot understand them.
Their whole object is to get money; and, provided they
can pick the pocket of half a joe, they care little about the
person that consults them. . . . This thing of the law has
been well said to be a bottomless pit.” The business of
education, Brackenridge thought, was “‘to form the heart
to a republican government.” A gentle irony was turned on
the American Philosophical Society, whose members were
made to mistake an Irish whiskey tax collector tarred and
feathered by an anti-tax mob for an “Anthroposornis or
manbird.”’

With moderation Brackenridge treated the great reforms
of the French Revolution as deserving the applause of all
good citizens, though the excesses were to be deplored;
but the leveling procedure must not be carried too far. ‘To
talk about ‘‘vox populi” was to play the demagogue; to
speak of ‘“‘serving’’ the people or the “‘majesty” of the
people smacked of monarchy. ‘Tailors and laborers were

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 475

simply silly if they cherished aspirations for public office;
they should stick like the cobbler to the last. It was
enough that an Irish mechanic should have the “right” to
be President, without thinking of exercising that high privi-
lege reserved for his betters. In short, Brackenridge’s
novel approved good, sound Republican government by
gentlemen of the Jefferson type. [he ‘‘monocrats” and
the ‘“‘democrats’” equally deserved to be cast into outer
darkness.

Far more radical than Brackenridge, though in practice
less concerned with the actual business of politics, was
Charles Brockden Brown, the outstanding novelist of the
time, forerunner of Cooper and Hawthorne. In Brown’s
intellect all the eddying currents of the age were reflected.
His religion betrayed the drift of the time: though he was
born of Quaker parents and continued to regard himself
to the end as a Christian, he was first attracted by Rous-
seau and the German sentimentalists and then drawn to
Voltaire and the rationalists. His politics admitted of no
doubt for his anti-Federalism was ingrained: he opposed
the adoption of the Constitution and was especially ag-
grieved because that document did not include the Declara-
tion of Independence.

Enabled by his knowledge of modern languages to keep
in touch with Continental thought and work, he came to
believe profoundly, with the French reformers, that the
cruelties and follies of superstition could be cleared away
by science and reason. Though he never rejected Chris-
tianity, he was clear-cut in denouncing the doctrines of total
depravity and infant damnation. ‘Human beings,” he
said in approved scientific temper, ‘‘are molded by the
circumstances in which they are placed. In this they are
allalike. The differences that flow from the sexual distinc-
tion are as nothing in the balance.’”’ Cherishing such no-
tions, Brown seized with avidity upon the writings of the
English radicals, especially of William Godwin, philosophic
anarchist, and of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book, A

476 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Vindication of the Rights of Women, appeared in 1792,
and was republished in Philadelphia in 1794—Jjust a hun-
dred years after Mary Astell’s Defense of the Female Sex
and Defoe’s advocacy of equal education.

Indeed, Brown was so affected by the prevailing dis-
criminations against women and the discussion of their
status, already agitating ‘‘advanced”’ minds, that he wrote
a brochure, Alcuin, in which he anticipated twentieth cen-
tury ideas of feminism with respect to economic independ-
ence, political rights, and legal equality. In this dialogue
a highly intelligent woman pleaded her own case: “I think.
we have the highest reason to complain of our exclusion
from many professions which might afford us, in common
with men, the means of subsistence and independence.”
In a broad sweep, she objected to the bars against so many
pursuits, to the denial of college education and the subjec-
tion of married women to the discipline of the common
law. ‘‘Are you a Federalist?” her questioner asked.
“What have I as a woman to do with politics?” she an-
swered. ‘“‘Even the government of our country, which is
said to be the freest in the world, passes over women as if
they were not. We are excluded from all political rights
without the least ceremony. Law-makers thought as little
of comprehending us in their code of liberty as if we were
pigs or sheep.”

The novels of Brown were also modern and didactic;
they all revealed the spirit of the left wing politics. His
first work of fiction, Wieland, was a plea for rationalism
as a cure for the evils induced by superstition and credulity.
Even when he entered the turgid realm of mystery, ration-
alism entered with him. In Clara Howard, he sang the
praise of the yeoman, objected to the poison of servility
that had lingered in society from colonial times, and por-
trayed a new woman thinking and acting for herself.
Through his pages walked sociological enthusiasts discours-
ing on law, marriage, riches, and reform. Scott, Godwin,
and Shelley read Brown’s books and English reviews com-

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC Tht

mended them but time did not deal gently with his long
homilies.

As a matter of fact, if Brown was the most creative
novelist of the early republic, women writers were the best
sellers and enjoyed the more enduring appreciation by the
populace. Pioneers in the field of fiction though they
were, their work outlasted the stories of all their male
contemporaries. In the year of Washington’s first inaugu-
ration, Sarah Wentworth Morton published the Power of
Sympathy, which critics agree was our first regular novel.
A few years later Susannah Haswell Rowson, though Eng-
lish by birth, issued in America a story called Charlotte
Temple in which she claimed that “vice however prosper-
ous in the beginning, in the end leads only to misery and
shame.’ It was the old triangle. ‘‘A pellucid drop had
stolen from her eyes and fallen upon a rose she was paint-
ing,’ ran the refrain; but the Americans bought it by the
thousands and it lived in edition after edition for genera-
tions. In 1797 Hannah Webster Foster published The
Coquette, a novel based upon an American episode, which
so charmed the general public that before the death of the
author in 1840 it had passed through thirteen editions.
Thus did the successors of Anne Hutchinson and Mary
Dyer at least invite their generation to consider other
themes than salvation and damnation, for many things had
happened since the landing of the Pilgrims.

§

In poetry as in imaginative prose the political and in-
tellectual conflicts of the republican age found their ex-
pression. The struggle for independence during the Amer-
ican Revolution was mirrored in John Trumbull’s Mc-
Fingal, a long political satire portraying the patriots vic-
torious over the Tories in argument and arms. When the
Revolutionary contest was ended and the American social
cleavage appeared, a group of verse makers, known as the

478 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Hartford Wits, assailed in the Anarchiad of 1787 the
leveling tendencies of the agrarian party with a virulence
that forecast Republican editorials on William Jennings
Bryan a hundred years later.

Bowing to a kindred passion, Thomas Green Fessenden,
in Democracy Unveiled or Tyranny Stripped of the Garb
of Patriotism, roundly abused Jefferson, Jacobinism,
atheism, and democracy. In fact, no novelties in the in-
tellectual world were allowed to pass unscathed. Vol-
taire and rationalism were bombarded by Timothy Dwight
in the Triumph of Infidelity—a long ode saturated with
Biblical lore. Nor must it be forgotten that William Cul-
len Bryant, dutiful son of a Federalist father, started his
career as a poet by a scurrilous attack on Jefferson and his
policies which was published in 1808 under the head of The
Embargo; that six years later, in a Fourth of July ode,
praising England, ‘Queen of the Isles,’’ he accused his own
government of waging a useless war.

On the other side of the line that divided the age into
warring camps were poets equally prolific and as fascinated
by the art of making verse. Philip Freneau, after render-
ing effective services to the patriot cause in the days of the
war, threw himself enthusiastically into the popular move-
ment led by Jefferson. Indeed as the editor of the National
Gazette—partly supported by his salary as translator in
Jefferson’s Department of State—Freneau employed his
biting sarcasm in analyzing the policies and measures of
Hamilton. If it is correct to call him “the poet of the
American revolution,” it is equally proper to say that he
was the bard of Jeffersonian Democracy and of the ration-
alist age.

Into Freneau’s party finally drifted the New England
poet, Joel Barlow, whose Vision of Columbus, published
in 1787, was hailed in England and France no less than at
home as a work giving promise of genius. One of the
Hartford Wits, Barlow took part in writing the Anarchiad
but later, while in France, he espoused the popular cause,

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 479

was granted French citizenship, and enjoyed the honor of
being attacked by Edmund Burke. After he finally settled
down in his native land, he brought out, in 1807, the Co-
lumbiad, a pretentious poem affecting the grand style but in
fact a ‘‘geographical, historical, political, and philosophical
disquisition”’ rather than a work of art. President Madi-
son made him minister to France and the rising democracy
claimed him as a bright star in its firmament but time was
ruthless to his poetry.

If William Cullen Bryant, in an essay on American
poetry, written soon after Barlow’s death, could with jus-
tice lightly dispose of all such efforts as The Columbiad
on the ground that they lacked in native instinct and sim-
plicity of style, he could not himself escape the impact
of the scientific rationalism which was so highly prized
by the democratic philosophers of his country. Federal-
ist though he was in origin, he later became a Democrat
and even in his youth he was so steeped in the new skep-
ticism that his great poem, Thanatopsis, written in 1811,
was in essence pagan, as his critics said, ‘‘because there is
no mention of the Deity in it nor recognition of the Chris-
tian doctrine of resurrection and immortality.”

To this charge his biographer could only reply that the
poem “takes the idea of Death out of its theological as-
pects and sophistications and the perversions of conscience
with which they are connected and restores it to its proper
place in the vast scheme of things.” The apology was it-
self a confession that Thanatopsis filled the mind of Jeffer-
son rather than that of Timothy Dwight.

§

The soul of the artist no less than the mind of the poet
was in some measure subdued during the early republic to
the interests, passions, and conflicts of the period. Work-
ers in the realm of the imagination were then, as always,
kindred spirits. The painter, as Charles Caffin points out

480 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

in his study of American art, is limited by his canvas,
while the orator, the poet, or the dramatist can crowd
his pages with scenes and characters; but the sentiments
behind their work and the influences of their environment
are almost identical. No doubt, the emotions expressed
by Barlow’s Columbiad and by Trumbull’s portrayal of
Bunker Hill were keyed to the same vibration.

Moreover, the artist, like the writer, had to be sustained.
William Dunlap, the sturdy democrat, might scorn the word
“patronage” but John Trumbull was near the truth when
he said that American artists could not look to the Church
or to the legislatures for support and were “‘necessarily
dependent upon the protection of the rich and great’’—the
strong bulwark of Hamilton’s party. ‘That fact, so clearly
recognized by a leading painter of the time, meant that art,
from the nature of things, could not swing as far to the
left as imaginative letters which could be maintained, in
part at least, by the pennies of the multitude. If painters
sometimes received commissions from city councils and state
legislatures or from Congress, they were forced to rely
in the main upon the pleasure of those who could pay for
oils and miniatures, and to endure the criticisms of the radi-
cal democrats who, on account of its historic position, asso-
ciated art with monarchies and aristocracies as a symbol of
servility. 7

By the cataclysm of the Revolution, the painters of pro-
vincial America were divided into factions: one, devoted
to the old and conventional society with its aristocratic pre-
tensions; the other, to the simplicity of the republican ideal.
For example, as we have noted, Copley adhered to the
party of unbending Tories, leaving the turmoil of the New
World for the security and milder atmosphere of Georgian
London where he could serve landed gentry and merchants
of more seasoned fortune than the planters of Virginia or
the traders of Philadelphia and Boston. On the other
hand, as if to offset this defection, Charles Wilson Peale
of Maryland, who was studying in England when the storm

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 481

broke, hurried home to share the fortunes of his native
land, taking a lively interest in the war for independence
and the political contests that followed.

Between battles and campaigns, Peale painted portraits
of the hero, Washington, fourteen in all, divining as it
were the place which the leader was to hold in the affec-
tions of the nation which he was so largely instrumental
in calling into being. Besides giving form and color to
numerous themes chosen from the life of the republic,
Peale, without breaking from the classical tradition, took
upon himself the task of spurring among his people an in-
terest in art and in the training of artists. He organized
the first exhibition of painting in America, tried to persuade
New York City to establish a museum of the arts and sci-
ences, and finally induced Philadelphia to raise the money
for such an institution in 1805 when New York betrayed
indifference. :

In founding the Pennsylvania Art Academy, its pro-
moters announced in brave, if quaint, language, ‘‘the high
and stalwart purpose of the times, a consciousness of the
limited conditions of the start, a conviction of the harvest
of the future.’ They proposed “‘to promote the cultiva-
tion of the Fine Arts in the United States of America by
introducing current and elegant copies from works of the
first masters in Sculpture and Painting and by thus facilitat-
ing the access to such standards and also by conferring
moderate but honorable premiums and otherwise assisting ©
studies and exciting the efforts of artists, gradually to un-
fold, enlighten, and invigorate the talents of our country-
men.’ ‘That was a courageous move; for when John
Pine, coming but a few years before to paint revolutionary
scenes, brought with him a cast of Venus de Medici, the
people of Philadelphia suffered a shock of fright. Even
after they recovered a bit, the model could only be shown
to a select few; devoted to Doric columns though it was,
the city shuddered at the very suggestion of the statues orig-
inally housed behind them. Nevertheless the home city of

482 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Franklin survived the ordeal and the young Academy
gained strength as the years passed by.

Among his colleagues from New England, Peale had a
friendly rival in John Trumbull, of Connecticut, who
shared his affection for the republican experiment. Trum-
bull was nineteen years old when the Revolution came
down upon his country but without hesitation he threw
himself into the patriot cause, laying aside book and brush
for rifle and sword and rising through distinguished serv-
ice to the rank of colonel, then to deputy adjutant-general.
When the triumph finally came at Yorktown, Trumbull
went to England to study under West and later to see the
work of the old masters on the Continent. Returning to
America, he started on his long career as a painter in New
York in 1804.

A veteran of the war, imbued with the spirit of the
Napoleonic age, and a Federalist of the old school, Trum-
bull’s mind was unresponsive to the naturalism of Rous-
seau which was stirring poets to ecstasies. Above all a
patriot, nothing was more appropriate, therefore, than
that he should choose American subjects and seek to im-
mortalize the heroes and scenes of the struggle for inde-
pendence. With something akin to military rigidity, he
made portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, and
painted the battle of Bunker Hill, the signing of the Dec-
laration of Independence, the surrender of Cornwallis, the
resignation of Washington, and other phases of the drama,
in the imposing style made famous at Versailles. Not a
figure was loved into immortality by soft caresses; the
same note of starched Roman formalism ran through his
painting of Washington that gave structure to Lee’s ora-
tion on the man ‘‘first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
It was, consequently, with a certain degree of fitness that
Trumbull associated himself with a number of rich New
Yorkers in 1808 to float the American Academy of Fine
Arts as a chartered corporation governed, not by a count-
ing of heads, but by an enumeration of the twenty-five dol-

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 483

lar shares held by the several stockholders who financed the
venture.

This intimate relation between the psychic affiliations
of the artist and the nature of his work was also well illus-
trated in the paintings of Trumbull’s distinguished contem-
porary, Gilbert Stuart. Though born in Rhode Island,
Stuart early forsook provincial America for a life in Lon-
' don, studying with Benjamin West. When, at length, the
break with the mother country rent his native land, instead.
of rushing home like Peale to throw himself into the fray,
he remained in England, aloof from the tempestuous pas-
sions of the hour, until the safe days of peace returned;
indeed, until Washington was reélected President for a
second term. But from 1793 to his death in 1828, he
labored with prolific industry in preserving to posterity with
ceremonial correctness the faces of great Americans—
among them Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and
then John Jacob Astor.

Whatever his subject, Stuart placed on its lights and
shadows the stamp of his inner.feelings, betraying in the
lines of his brush a chill remoteness from the crash of the
patriot battles and the fervent strivings of the new repub-
lic. ‘‘Stuart,’’ justly remarks Caffin, “‘did not share in the
life spirit of the nation,’ was a bit too elegant and cos-
mopolitan. ‘On the other hand, before the grimly intel-
lectual or austerely visionary faces of Smibert’s New Eng-
land divines, the precise elegance and proud self-sufficiency
of Copley’s men and women of the world, or Peale’s bald
masculine records of the man upon whom devolved the
leadership of a new nation, we can recognize a series of
types and in our imagination reconstruct their environment.
. . . We may transport ourselves beyond the then present,
as the founders of the nation did, ‘and feel the future in
the instant.’ ”

It is not a cause for wonder that Washington, the Vir-
ginia planter, indomitable leader of a revolutionary cause,
and great political pacificator, was subdued by Stuart to the

484 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

varnish of an old English man-of-arms. Unquestionably
the painter was deeply drawn to Washington, confessing
that he lost his self-possession in the presence of that illus-
trious man but he failed to induce the General to part the
curtain and reveal his secret self. Although the full length
portrait may have satisfied Lord Lansdowne, to whom it
was presented, neither that picture nor the Atheneum por-
trait painted at Mrs. Washington’s request gave to pos-
_terity a luminous conception of the living personality dis-
closed by his own diaries, letters, and papers. It may be
said, of course, that, whereas Peale painted Washington
in the full tide of manhood, Stuart saw him only in later
life after responsibility and suffering had given their wonted
gravity to his face but this fact alone will not account for
the frigid, if correct, solemnity that directs Stuart’s every
stroke.

In sculpture and architecture, the young republic with all
its aspirations could do little more than borrow. The
former was yet an alien art among Anglo-Saxons and
the Americans consequently had no English heritage on
which to build. Apparently American interest in sculpture
was manifest at first in the South and shyly, even where
Puritan fear of satanic alliances was weakest in its grip.
But native talent was wanting. The years were far off when
a Celtic genius, Saint Gaudens, born in Dublin but reared
in America, could carve a Diana in lines comparable to
Houdon’s and at the same time catch the unconquerable
spirit of a Puritan father.

So the patronage of European artists was the only resort.
When Virginia decided to immortalize La Fayette and
Washington, it was forced to turn to Houdon, who had
already delighted France with his Morphée, if he had
shocked the Salon with his nude Diana. It was to his
fortunate acceptance that Richmond owed its heroic statue
of the great revolutionary leader. In some of the richer
southern homes, the love of the plastic arts also found
expression in beautiful importations. For instance, from

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 485

an English admirer, Samuel Vaughan, Washington received
an Italian mantel, exclaiming when he first saw it, “I greatly
fear that it is too elegant and costly for my room and
republican style of living’’; but its charm melted his scruples
and to the end he cherished it with keen delight.

Through the architecture of the republican age, the
political note rang with startling intonations. In casting
off monarchy and established church, the patriot Fathers,
like their emulative contemporaries, the leaders of the
French republic, returned in their dreams, their oratory,
and their architecture to the glories of republican Greece
and Rome—to the simple columns, roofs, porticoes, and
straight lines of early Mediterranean structures. Nothing
seemed to them more appropriate. ‘The ornate elaboration
of renaissance Gothic appeared out of place in a country
that was republican in politics, practical in its interests, and
tinged, at least, with democracy. There was of course
no strict uniformity of thought but the stamp of the classics
was heavy on the official buildings and private mansions of
the period.

It was with a mind fixed upon the imposing designs of
ancient city planners that Major L’Enfant conceived his
elaborate scheme for the city of Washington—a scheme for
which he received shabby treatment at the time and trivial
recognition in a military funeral nearly one hundred years
after he was laid a pauper in a quickly forgotten grave.
When, in 1808, the adopted son of Washington built his
mansion at Arlington, Virginia, he seemed convinced that
the final triumph of art lay in the achievements of the
Greeks two thousand years in their tombs. It was to the
simplicity, solemnity, and power of Rome, despoiler of
Greece, that Jefferson turned for the design of his Univer-
sity of Virginia. In the same reverence for classical an-
tiquity, the colonial Georgian style was now pushed aside by
architects who built mansions for southern planters, banks,
ofhces for the federal government, and the capitol to house
the Congress of the United States. Those who fashioned

486 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

material structures and those who drafted orations drew
their inspiration from the same source.

§

The moment independence was assured, articles, pam-
phlets, and books on the function of education in the new
social order poured from the presses, the anxiety of private
individuals for the future of the republic being supple-
mented by the stimulus of a prize offered by the American
Philosophical Society for ‘‘the best system of liberal edu-
cation and literary instruction, adapted to the genius of the
government of the United States; comprehending also a
plan for instituting and conducting public schools in this
country, on the principles of the most extensive utility.”
So important did the subject seem to the founders of the
republic that the outstanding men of the time bent their
minds to it—Washington, Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Noah
Webster, and James Sullivan, as well as writers less known
to general history, such as Robert Coram, Nathaniel Chip-
man, Samuel Knox, and Samuel Harrison Smith. ‘Though
most of the tracts and pamphlets lie buried in the dust of
libraries, their influence still lives in American educational
theory; and a recent scholar, Allen Oscar Hansen, has paid
generous tribute to the services of the republican pioneers in
his volume on Liberalism and American Education in the
Eighteenth Century.

In the wide range of speculation, nothing human or per-
tinent to the coming centuries seems to have been over-
looked by the thinkers who pondered on the role of educa-
tion in civilization. A composite view of their ideas shows
that, in their enthusiasm for new and revolutionary con-
cepts, they far outran the commonalty, anticipating in
almost every phase projects a hundred years ahead of their
day. In the first place, they recognized the deplorable
state of the education received from colonial times—mis-
erable schoolhouses, meager equipment, and poorly-trained

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 487

teachers. On the constructive side they nearly all insisted
that there should be a nation-wide system of popular edu-
cation, universal, sometimes including girls, supported by
general taxation, running from the elementary school to
the university. “It is a shame, a scandal to civilized so-
ciety, that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges
and universities to learn to cheat the rest of their liberties,”’
exclaimed Robert Coram.

Turning to the purpose and content of education, the
eighteenth century critics were equally explicit. In their
view the prime end of education was to help realize the
ideal of progress, raise the general level of well-being, bring
all citizens within the range of the codperative life, apply
science to the service of mankind, prepare pupils for eco-
nomic independence, instruct them in the duties of citizen-
ship, instill in them republican principles, strengthen and
enrich American nationality. As an instrument for the
realization of such theories freedom of thought—the foe
of bigotry—was to be encouraged. “‘A perfect freedom
of debate is essential to a free government,” urged Noah
Webster in his Sketches of American Policy. ‘A vigorous
spirit of research’? was to be promoted, according to the ©
creed in Samuel H. Smith’s Remarks on Education. “I
wish,” said James Sullivan, “‘to excite some of my younger
countrymen .. . to bend their attention and endeavor to
make deep researches into what constitutes man’s happiness
individually and in society.’’ Some writers naturally laid
stress on one phase to the neglect of others, but broadly
speaking the whole structural foundation for modern the-
ory and practice was sketched with wonderful foresight,
considering that feminism was then confined to esoteric
circles and that the revolution wrought by technology lay
hidden in the future.

A resolute nationalist of the Hamilton school, Washing-
ton looked upon higher education as the servant of the new
constitutional system which had been erected with such
labor and required for its maintenance support on every

488 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

side. In his first message to Congress he dwelt solemnly
upon the matter of promoting science and letters and rais-
ing up an educated nation competent to the great task of
self-government. Though he did not venture to decide
the best method of attaining the object, he hinted at aid
for existing institutions and the foundation of a national
university.

-As to Washington’s personal views there was no doubt.
Having learned from practical experience in the Continental
army the advantages to be derived from the mingling of
youths from every section, he wished to establish an Ameri-
can University so high in its standing that the necessity
of going to Europe would be eliminated and students
from every corner of the United States would be at-
tracted to its halls. As an evidence of his interest, he
left in his will a sum of money to be devoted to the endow-
ment of such an institution, if Congress should ever be in-
clined to extend ‘‘a fostering hand to it.”’

Unfortunately the fine vision was not caught by his
countrymen. Military and naval academies were, indeed,
founded at West Point and Annapolis but the dream of a
national university to unite the minds and hearts of those
who were to guide America in the coming years was not
realized, jealousies among existing colleges and the triumph
of the state’s rights party defeating the project.

The second great educational proposal of the early pe-
riod, likewise blighted by indifference, united the national-
ism of Washington with the democratic humanism of Jef-
ferson. Appropriately enough, it came from Philadelphia
and from Benjamin Rush, one of the Franklin circle. In
framing his educational ideal, Rush brought the whole coun-
try within his purview, conceiving of its spiritual develop-
ment as a national unity. The university with which he
proposed to crown the hierarchy of schools, serving the
cause of human progress as an American institution, was
to be a post-graduate college preparing youths for public
life. |

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 489

Its curriculum, worked out in detail by the meticulous
author, was to include among the subjects for instruction:
the principles and forms of government—everything relat-
ing to peace, war, treaties, and general administration;
ancient and modern history; agriculture, in all its branches;
history, principles, objects, and channels of commerce;
principles and practices of manufactures; applied mathe-
matics; the parts of natural philosophy and chemistry re-
lating to agriculture, manufacture, commerce, and war (for
war is apt to continue, however un-Christian, he said) ;
natural history; philology, rhetoric, and criticism; modern
languages opening the gates to knowledge relative to na-
tional improvements of all kinds; athletics and manly
exercises. :

Thus Rush proposed to explore and teach the new learn-
ing, and to teach it in the compelling terms of utility.
“The present age,’ he said, “is the age of simplicity of
style in American writings. ‘The turgid style of Johnson—
the purple glare of Gibbon—and the studious and thick set
metaphors of Junius—are equally unnatural and should not
be admitted to our country.” Citing the examples of Rus-
sia and Denmark, Rush suggested that two specialists be
assigned for advanced research in natural science and that
four be sent abroad in the quest for new knowledge; not
overlooking the fact that northern Europe and England
had borrowed heavily from Mediterranean peoples.

‘While the business of education in Europe,’”’ Rush de-
clared, ‘‘consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and
the antiquities of Herculaneum or in disputes about Hebrew
points, Greek particles or the accent and quantity of the
Roman languages, the youth of America will be employed
in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase
the conveniences of life, lessen human misery, improve our
country, promote population, exalt the human understand-
ing, and establish domestic and political happiness.” To
make the teachings of his great school effective Rush pro-
posed that after the lapse of thirty years all civil officers

490 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

be chosen exclusively from its graduates with a view to
eliminating quacks from politics as from law and medicine!
The president of this university, he urged, should be a
man of extensive education as well as of liberal manners
and dignity.

But Washington’s project and Rush’s plan were too na-
tionalistic in spirit and purpose to secure the cordial sup-
port of a country that had begun its career by exalting
the sovereignty of the states and had swung back to that
creed in 1800 after a temporary period of high centraliza-
tion. So in keeping with the drift of political opinion
it happened that Jefferson, the theorist, became the prac-
tical builder in the field of education. No one on the
American continent had more enthusiasm for the subject;
no one had more confidence in education as the instrument
for the preservation and development of democracy. As
his political affection centered on the state, so his educa-
tional efforts were mainly confined to that sphere, even
though he did indorse the idea of a national university.

Remembering, perhaps, the size of Athens and her
achievements, Jefferson preferred to devote his talents to
Virginia rather than to wear himself out trying to induce
Congress to establish a continental system. But in the
field he did choose and the work he attempted, the spirit
of the modern age shone forth abundantly. Seeing the
youth of the land casting off the old learning for “intuition
and self-sufficiency,” he proposed to hold their intellectual
enthusiasm by offering the new learning of the laboratory
and research. For the theological and scholastic system
so dominant in the colonial régime, he proposed to substi-
tute one that was scientific, modern, and practical in char-
acter. He did not, of course, ignore the wisdom of the
ancients, far from it, but his emphasis was different. ‘“‘I
am for encouraging the progress of science in all its
branches,” he wrote to a friend in 1799.

At first Jefferson lavished his affections on his alma
mater, William and Mary, which had suffered heavily from

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 491

the loss of its English revenues during the Revolution. As
a member of the board of trustees, he helped to bring about
the adoption of his leading ideas and to work a transforma-
tion in that college by the introduction of modern lan-
guages and the establishment of chairs in law, history, and
political economy. Not long after Blackstone began his
lectures on jurisprudence at Oxford, Wythe was expound-
ing great principles of the law at William and Mary. In
the enthusiasm for innovations, Greek and Latin were for
a time dropped from the regular program and could be
studied only privately with one of the professors. As
if to emphasize the democracy of the age, the status of
the students was raised by granting to them a larger free-
dom in selecting subjects and by adopting the honor system
for their examinations. Thus, even in the midst of rev-
olution, Jefferson made to prevail in an Anglican college
much of the liberal thesis which he was to apply on a grand
scale in the University of Virginia founded by him more
than a quarter of a century later.

In the northern colleges, on the other hand, scientific
and social studies made slower headway. It is true that
Williams College, chartered by the Massachusetts legisla-
ture of 1793 and opened under the guidance of Yale alumni,
made some novel departures; it immediately permitted the
offering of French instead of Greek as an entrance subject
and soon established a program of French language and
literature, followed by special courses in law, civil polity,
mathematics, and natural philosophy. It is true also that
Bowdoin College, organized in 1802 under a charter of the
Massachusetts legislature, offered a milder brand of Cal-
vinist theology to the boys of the Maine woods who were
not rich enough to go to Harvard; and boasted of having
on its faculty Parker Cleaveland, who won distinction both
at home and in Europe for his contributions to chemistry
and mineralogy.

In the main, however, the colleges of the North, except-
ing Franklin’s institution at Philadelphia, escaped the influ-

492 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ence of French science, skepticism, and humanism. When
Ezra Stiles, on his inauguration as president of Yale in
1778, sketched his scheme of higher education, he left to .
the classics their wonted authority, relegated geography,
mathematics, history, and belles lettres to a secondary place,
and bent higher mathematics, natural philosophy, and
astronomy to the purposes of theology. In the history of
American intellectual development there is nothing more
illuminating than the contrast presented by a Yale com-
mencement address of the late eighteenth century and one
a hundred years afterward.

Harvard, in the age of Jefferson, likewise clung rather
closely to established academic customs. A distinguished,
if ungrateful, son, Harrison Gray Otis, flung at his alma
‘mater the charge that she was dominated by pedantry
and logic. ‘‘May Father Time,” he said in 1782, ‘‘ameli-
orate his pace and hasten the desired period when [ shall
bid adieu to the sophisticated Jargon of a superstitious
synod of pensioned bigots and ramble in the field of lib-
eral science.’ In the bitter exaggeration of the under-
graduate was revealed the continued supremacy of ancient
ideals in the old institutions of the North—institutions
which had passed through the political and economic revolu-
tion without breaking the sway of the theological regimen.

§

It was in the theory and practice of secondary education
rather than in the higher learning that the most thorough-
going innovations were made at the turn of the century.
The movement of democratic opinion, naturally in favor of
popular education, was accelerated by the influence of doc-
trines from Europe. Out of the philosophy of Rousseau,
the fiery French radical, interpreted by German and Swiss
experimenters, flowered a varied and luxuriant literature
on the training of the young and their relations to society—
a literature so rich that, according to estimates, twice as

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 493

many books on the subject were printed during the last
quarter of the eighteenth century as during the preceding
three quarters. Certainly no phase of the question was. un-
touched. Education in agriculture and the manual arts,
social discipline, gymnastics, moral and religious culture,
the secularization of the curricula by emphasis on modern
languages, geography, history, and science, and even the
complete elimination of theological motives from the class
room were now advocated in proposals for reform.

Underlying the new concepts were Rousseau’s sentiments :
repugnance to tradition and devotion to nature, observation,
and the cultivation of social sympathies. Reflecting the
political ideals of the age, the child’s right to happiness was
placed beside the current emphasis on the adult’s right to
liberty and opposed at every point to the formalism and
discipline of governing classes bent upon making artisans,
peasants, and soldiers only—humanity against class domin-
ion, democracy against authority. This was the dream
which Basedow sought to realize at Dessau in Germany
and Pestalozzi at Yverdon in Switzerland. ‘All the
beneficent powers of men are due neither to art nor chance,
but to nature,’’ exclaimed the Swiss pedagogue. From
that premise it logically followed that “education must pur-
sue the course laid down by nature.”

In America, this philosophy and the practice based upon
it were strongly advocated by William Maclure of Phila-
delphia, a retired merchant and amateur in science who
visited Yverdon and in 1805 published a book on the
school. The next year, Maclure imported from Switzer-
land an apostle of Pestalozzi to lecture on the new educa-
tion and give demonstrations. Within a short time Pesta-
lozzian schools were founded at Philadelphia and at various
places in Kentucky and the West, planting the germs
of a humane and democratic system of education for
foliation when the funds with which to nurture them could
be provided.

Nothing could have been more acceptable to the disciples

494 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of Jefferson than the revolutionary concept of life embodied
in these plans of education for it exactly squared with his
philosophy of politics. The conservative system of Eu-
rope, he contended, was founded on the doctrine that ‘‘men
in numerous associations cannot be restrained within the
limits of order and justice but by forces physical and moral,
wielded over them by authorities independent of their

will. . . . We believed that man was a rational animal,
endowed by nature with rights and an innate sense of jus-
tice.” One relied upon formalism and artifices to hold the

lower orders of society in check; the other proposed to cut
loose from the past, trust in the beneficent powers given
to man by nature, and develop them by a simple process into
social harmony. So the revolutionary gospel of the Euro-
pean experimentalists fitted neatly into the pattern of the
Republican statesman of Virginia.

§

Since the colleges were beyond the reach of the Ameri-
can masses stirred by novel aspirations in the ferment of
the revolutionary movement and since the ruling orders
in the states were not prepared to tax themselves for the
support of public schools, the immediate answer to the new
demands was the academy, usually founded under private
and local auspices, though in many cases with state aid and
support. Unhampered by the traditional curricula of the
colleges, and controlled by enterprising individuals rather
than by clerical boards of trustees, the academies began
to break paths taward a liberal education more precisely
adapted to American life.

Unlike the old classical grammar schools, academies
escaped the whip of the college entrance requirements, for
a time, at least. Bidding for the patronage of sons and
daughters of merchants and farmers who could not hope
to attend institutions of higher learning, they reached
a hitherto untouched middle stratum of the population. In

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 495

the circumstances greater flexibility of curriculum was pos-
sible: the classics and theology were reduced when not
omitted entirely, while French, art, history, and literature
for the first time found favor in the scheme of secondary
education. If, as correctly charged, the academies later
became vested interests which opposed the rise of the public
school system, still they helped in their day to weaken the
grip of scholasticism on the higher learning and prepare
the way for the humanities.

Yet at best the academies left unsolved the problem that
puzzled radical leaders of the revolutionary age; namely,
how to lift the mass of the people from illiteracy into
the world of culture, out of subserviency and apathy into
codperative and energetic citizenship. Many a_philos-
opher, with Jefferson in the van, dreamed of the day and
sketched plans for universal education, for boys, at least.
State constitutions and legislatures made grand declarations
of principles on the subject but it was one thing to put a
project on paper and another thing to convert the govern-
ing classes to the notion of taxing themselves for it or to
overcome the age-old inertia of the populace. So in these
conditions the sectarian and charity schools of colonial
times continued to hold the general field of elementary edu-
cation, although like the colleges they lost the support of
funds from England when the break with the mother
country was made.

They were supplemented and extended, however, by two
new and important agencies, both imported from England.
The first of these was the Sunday school, especially de-
signed to reach the children of the poor on a day when
they were not employed. While generally associated with
religious sects and always emphasizing instruction in the
Scriptures, the Sunday school movement in the beginning
was broader than any mere sectarian intent and was sup-
ported, especially in England where it originated, by inter-
denominational societies founded for that object. “Though
regarded as perilously democratic by conservative Angli-

496 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

cans, the Sunday school was promoted by dissenters with so
much fervor that interest in the institution spread to the
United States.

In 1791, ‘The First-Day or Sunday School Society” was
organized at Philadelphia for the purpose of extending
elementary instruction to the poor. ‘The experiment was
true to form but American tendencies gave a peculiar direc-
tion to later developments. There was no large sub-
merged mass of paupers in the United States, such as ex-
isted in England, and the little schools established here and
there by the various sects were already reaching deep down
into the social order. So the Sunday schools assumed a
more theological tone in America than in England, becom-
ing as a rule mere adjuncts to the churches that sustained
them, leaving other than religious training to the ordinary
day schools. Nevertheless before the age of compulsory,
secular education, they gave elementary instruction in read-
ing to thousands who were not within the fold of the other
sectarian institutions.

The second English scheme for reaching the masses with
elementary instruction was the monitorial school in which
the older pupils transmitted to the younger information
they had themselves learned by rote from the teachers.
The idea was an ancient one. A Portuguese traveler saw
it in operation in India in the early part of the seventeenth
century. Jesuits had made extensive use of it, and at
various places in Europe it had been developed long be-
fore the end of the eighteenth century when England and
the United States resorted to the project. Yet, in common
opinion, it was with the name of Joseph Lancaster, an
English Quaker philanthropist, that the formal beginning
of a great movement in 1798 was associated—although
Andrew Bell, perhaps with a better show of justice, claimed
to have inaugurated the system by an experiment started
previously under the auspices of the Established Church.
Indeed, in England two schemes of monitorial instruction,
one nonconformist and the other Anglican, ran side by

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 497

side, later with state financial assistance, until the adoption
of the board school program in 1870.

Whatever its origin, in the United States the monitorial
project soon attracted the interest of educational theorists.
In 1809 the Public School Society of New York introduced
it into its schools and a few years later Lancaster himself
came to America to apply his scheme in person. Although
he proved to be a stubborn and intolerant teacher and
finally sank into poverty and distress, his method for edu-
cating the masses spread into every state in the Union.
It was taken up by some of the academies; it was adopted
by the schools later instituted for training teachers; and
when state education finally entered the field, it was em-
ployed at first by Indiana and Maryland. Crude as it
was and destined to vanish before the freer systems and
practices of Pestalozzi and Froebel, the monitorial plan af-
forded the only solution to the problem of mass training in
an age that had little money or would not impose taxes to
pay for anything better. It was cheap, it was practical, it
was one step nearer universal, free education.

That ideal—schools for all free children supported by
taxation—made slow headway through the years that fol-
lowed independence. In the midst of the Revolution,
1779, Jefferson brought before the legislature of Vir-
ginia a bill proposing to lay the commonwealth out into
districts and provide each with a school maintained by pub-
lic revenues, open to the children of all citizens, free of
tuition for the first three years. Though the bill failed to
pass, the plan persisted. |

While Jefferson’s contemporaries did not like imposts
and excises any better after the Revolution than before,
they had at their disposal a rich treasury of undeveloped
natural resources which could be dedicated in part to the
uses of education. If they did not dare to tax their con-
stituents for the support of common schools, they could
at least reserve wild lands for that purpose. In that rela-
tion they had before them a high example set by the Con-

498 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

gress under the Articles of Confederation when, in the
Ordinance of 1785, it dedicated one section of land in each
township of the Ohio Territory to the maintenance
of public schools. Moreover, many state constitutions
declared, with big flourishes, that schools should be estab-
lished in the public interest though they provided no means
for their support. Rhode Island, Maryland, and the Caro-
linas, for instance, made grand gestures that came to little
or nothing.

There was in America no Prussian monarch to impose a
compulsory system on the people for reasons of state.
Consequently the project of universal free education had
to be evolved gradually in a democratic fashion, under the
leadership of men and women with vision, who realized
that they could move only as fast as knowledge of the ideal
could be disseminated and practical interests enlisted for its
support. When at last the task was seriously undertaken,
at the middle of the nineteenth century, the stamp of Amer-
ican nationality was clear upon it.

§

During the transition from province to nation, that
strange process, so closely described by Carlyle, in which
literature ‘‘emerged out of the cloisters into the open Mar-
ket-place and endeavoured to make itself room and gain a
subsistence there,’ worked a revolution in American jour-
nalism. The challenge of novel facts, impetuous aspirations,
and social controversies enlarged the power of the press and
gave substance to writers who fed its capacious maw.
Every phase of the dramatic story from the mustering of
the Stamp Act Congress to the battle of New Orleans,
every hope and every theory of the fermenting age can be
traced in the news stories, the editorials, and the fugitive
articles that filled the columns of weeklies, monthlies, and
eventually dailies.

Throughout the period, magazines bloomed like roses in

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 499

summer time, dying with the same regularity. From Bos-
ton, Massachusetts, to Lexington, Kentucky, enterprising
editors flung out their tiny sheets with wistful patriotism,
the titles of their little journals betraying their hearts’
desire: The American Magazine, The Columbian Maga-
zine, The American Universal Magazine, and finally the
North American Review—the last, founded in 1815, being
the only one of a great crowd that survived the rush of
time. Leaving the rage of party faction to the newspapers,
editors of weekly and monthly periodicals devoted them-
selves to literature, morals, science, and the arts. ‘Their
catholicity of interest was well illustrated by the descrip-
tive note attached to a typical magazine of the time: “A
monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertain-
ment containing Poetry, Musick, Biography, History,
Physics, Geography, Morality, Criticism, Philosophy,
Mathematics, Agriculture, Architecture, Chemistry, Nov-
els, Tales, Romances, Translations, News, Marriages, and
Deaths, Meteorological Observations, etc., etc.”’

Venturing beyond the written word, some of the more
audacious editors included in their pages a few simple
engravings which evidently added to the appeal of their
journals, for when one of them afterward substituted type
for pictures “the admirers of this polite art earnestly called
for their re-assumption.”’ Encyclopedic in their range,
these early magazines popularized literature, science, and
art in an age before public libraries were general and
before education was wide and comprehensive. They fur-
nished “subsistence” for a school of writers who broke a
path for Cooper, Irving, Prescott, Poe, and Lowell: Their
pomposity and ridiculous chauvinism will, no doubt, be par-
doned by those acquainted with Old World magazines of
the same period.

As if to soften the stresses of life in the New World, the
periodicals of the young republic made much of poetry,
each having its ‘‘Pegasus, its Cabinet of Apollo, its Seat
of the Muses, its Parnassiad; even the most prosaic its

500 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Poetical Essays or its Poetical Provisions.” They could
all boast of narrative verse ‘‘both serious and jocose”’ ap-
parently on the theory that poetry like music could soothe
the savage breast. One of them printed An Elegant Ode
on the Mechanism of Man; another published some lines
To a Lady on Striking a Fly with Her Fan. In any event
there was a thirsty craving for ‘‘good taste’ which led
editors to specialize in tabloid culture responding, perhaps,
to the taunts of English writers that, bereft of their leader-
ship and authority, the Americans would become “literary
ourang-outangs.”’

With positive poignancy did the Christian’s, Scholar’s
and Farmer’s Magazine feel a call to labor among the
heathen, receiving from a watchful contributor, who wel-
comed its efforts, suggestions as to one neglected field that
needed cultivation. ‘A deficiency of learning,” he lamented,
“hath often been very sensibly regretted by many worthy
characters in these states when elevated to public and im-
portant offices; and frequently ignorance hath not only ex-
posed them to ridicule but been injurious to the interests of °
the public.”

The writer then illustrated with a case that must have
been peculiarly embarrassing to young republicans who
had just tossed off British supremacy: ‘‘We mention partic-
ularly a circumstance that exposed a very popular patriot
in London a few years past to contempt and occasioned
him to become a subject of ridicule in the public papers of
the metropolis. In an oration he made at Guildhall, in-
stead of speaking in the superlative degree, which he wished
to have done, through ignorance, he made use of the dou-
ble comparative—more better.’’ Dreadful error and be-
fore a London audience at that! From such grief sprang
the first of the American ‘“‘Mentors” to give to the un-
tutored an education in the superlatives of dining, dancing,
and dallying, in addition to proprieties of speech.

From this cultural anguish the ladies were by no means
exempt. On the contrary they were early discovered as

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 501

the very bulwark of correct taste. Independence was
hardly declared when one rash editor introduced the “‘ele-
gant polish of the female pen”’ and, as the years passed, the
ladies won an ever larger share in the pages of the maga-
zines. [heir virtues were extolled, love stories were
printed for their idle hours, poetical enigmas and rebuses
were provided to stretch their tender minds, examples of
refined correspondence between the sexes were furnished as
guides to ready letter writers, and stray fragments were
printed to arouse ‘‘desultory thoughts upon the utility of
encouraging a degree of self-complacency especially in the
female bosoms’’—all with a fervent desire to ‘‘please rather
than wound woman, the noblest work of God.” In 1792
came the climax with the appearance of an all-lady reposi-
tory designed to circulate primarily in the boarding schools,
it seems.

The venture was daring, yet discreet; for the ladies’ mag-
azines of the young republic, like their successors to the
days of Edward Bok, refrained from encouraging any
froward feminism. ‘‘The female patronesses of literature,”
‘insinuated the gracious editor, ‘‘while they discover an un-
derstanding in the fairest part of intelligent creation to dis-
tinguish works of real merit from the false glare of empty
professions, at the same time also shed a luster on the
amiable qualities which adorn the minds of the fair. It is
theirs to ease the weary traveler in the rugged paths of
science and soften the rigors of intense study; it is theirs
to chase the diffidence of bashful merit and give dignity to
the boldest thought. . . . Every lover of the ladies will
stand forth as a champion in defense of a work peculiarly
calculated for the instruction and amusement of the lovely.”’

Of all the great flock of magazines that sued for patron-
age two or three managed to live long enough to attain
distinction. First among these was Matthew Carey’s Co-
lumbian Magazine, founded in Philadelphia in 1786, a
staple in intellectual circles for more than half a century.
His American Museum, founded the next year, com-

502 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

manded for its pages articles from Franklin, Rush,
Freneau, Hopkinson, and Trumbull that were solid in sub-
stance, dignified in style and appropriate to the age, empha-
sizing science and economics rather than theology and polite
letters. Somewhat lighter and yet marked by critical dis-
cernment was the Literary Magazine and American Regis-
ter, which ran through a brief career in the same city under
the direction of Charles Brockden Brown, already famous
as a novelist, the author of Arthur Mervyn.

Not to be eclipsed by Philadelphia, some intellectual
Brahmins of Boston—the Anthology Club, composed of
several ‘‘gentlemen of literary interests’—launched, in
1803, The Monthly Anthology and Magazine of Polite
Literature, a work of love edited, as well as sustained, by
its sponsors. Convinced that the trafic was now blocked
by the mob, by too many writers producing ‘‘worthless
weeds prematurely,” the directors insisted that articles and
book reviews for the journal should be characterized by
expertness and quality.

Indeed, so excellent was their work that the promoters
of the North American Review, when establishing their
magazine in 1815, selected William Tudor from the An-
thology Club to serve as their editor. Thus favorably in-
augurated, this Review continued to be issued in Boston
for more than sixty years, marshaling to its aid the most
eminent minds. of New England and acting as the arbiter
of conservative taste in letters and politics in that section
—until its removal to New York in 1878. Only when The
Atlantic Monthly came into the arena in 1857 did it have
a serious competitor for northern patronage.

True to the traditions of emancipated provinces, the
poignant persons who edited the magazines of the young
republic were vexed with longings to win above all the
favor of the Old World. Whena French traveler declared
that the arts, except that of navigation, received little at-
tention in America and that the ‘“‘Bostonians think of the
useful before procuring to themselves the agreeable,” it

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 503

gave great sorrow to his American readers. ‘‘It has been
suggested,’ said the promoters of the Nightingale or
Melange of Literature, in 1796, “that the inhabitants of
Boston prefer viewing the manifest of a ship’s cargo to a
lounge in the library. Let it not be said that in the pursuit
of gain, Literature and the Muses are left at a distance,
and that a sordid lust for gold has banished every noble
sentiment, every mental delight from the bosoms of the
avaricious Bostonians. God forbid that any foe to our
country shall ever have reason to say that our native town
is the residence of Ignorance, though it should be the em-
porium of Plutus.”

While couched in the moving style of the period, this
plea was apparently not heeded, for Emerson, looking
back upon the history of Massachusetts during the period
that lay between 1790 and 1820, felt moved to exclaim
that ‘‘there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a
thought in the state.” Nevertheless it could be said that
those rough sea captains who preferred viewing a ship’s
manifest to scanning a library shelf, who had never heard
of Arius or Gainsborough, were changing the world to
which the Philosophers of the Brook Farm school long
afterward appealed. From the fabled East, Boston navi-
gators brought tea and silks, fragments of a fragile art,
accounts of strange traditions and religions, awakening a
spirit of adventure that went far in dissolving the theo-
logical monopoly of thought and other Puritan legacies.
Quite as much as the dialecticians, they made unitarianism
and transcendentalism popular. And if lowly, but indis-
pensable, services were not to be despised, it had to be
recorded that they amassed the fortunes which enabled
the Ticknors, Brookses, Adamses, Prescotts, Parkmans,
Lowells, and Jameses to cut loose from the smell of salt
and tar, to dream dreams in the milder atmosphere of
the Old World where the sea captains and accumulators
of an earlier time had already done their work of prepara-
tion for the softer generations to come.

504 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Relieved of literary burdens by magazines, the news-
papers sprang full armed into the political arena. During
the stormy days of the Stamp Act, they were transformed
from colorless bulletins into flaming sheets of sedition, kin-
dling passions that never died away. Throughout the war
for independence a battle royal was waged between the
Tory and the Patriot press, and when that issue was settled,
local disputes of the triumphant Americans still furnished
an abundance of fuel for editorial fires. Into the fight over
the Constitution publishers plunged with relish, and later, as
Hamilton’s measures came up one by one before Congress,
they secured endless and lively themes for news and com-
ment. When at length the alignment between the Federal-
ists and the Republicans was clearly defined, every news-
paper of importance became a party organ, exchanging
advocacy for patronage and praise.

As the factional struggle waxed hotter and hotter and
the population increased, new papers appeared until at
last every city and every village of any size had its press.
Forty-three colonial sheets, it is reckoned, survived the
Revolution; thirty years later an assiduous counter esti-
mated that the United States had three hundred and sixty-
six newspapers.

Of the new journals that entered the fray two of the
most powerful were personal organs of the great party
leaders, Hamilton and Jefferson. Scarcely was the former
installed in office, when he induced John Fenno to bring out
in New York in April, 1789, The Gazette of the United
States, to defend the administration of Washington, that
is, his own economic policies. Jefferson replied in kind
about two years later, taking the cue from his rival, by
‘supporting Freneau, the poet, in the publication of the
National Gazette at Philadelphia, to which the capital had
then been removed.

The age of the daily had now opened; by the close of
Jefferson’s administration in 1809 there were at least
twenty-seven dailies scattered from Boston to New Orleans

THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 505

—nearly all partisan, sustaining or attacking the admin-
istration in power or serving some personal or factional
cause. When the capital was transferred to Washington,
this city became the center of political journalism, holding
that strategic position until the telegraph broke its monop-
oly and brought every editorial room near to the seat of
national sovereignty.

As party organs, these newspapers vividly exhibited the
passions of the combatants in the political field, the scurrili-
ties to which both sides resorted passing modern belief,
though they were not peculiarly American at the time.
With withering scorn and contempt, Hamilton’s organ
treated the opposition as low-born demagogues. Though
his party boasted of commanding the talents as well as the
wealth of the country and felt limited—somewhat—by the
requirements of gentility, the reader of to-day, when turn-
ing over the yellow leaves of the Federalist organs, will
have difficulty in discerning the fruits of that restraint. Not
without a touch of retribution, perhaps, Jefferson was daily
smeared with charges of being an atheist, a leveler, an
agrarian, an anarchist, a democrat, a demagogue—all syn-
onyms for criminality in the Federalist camp.

On the other side, Jefferson’s party spoke frankly for the
people and the editorials of its press savored of the soil.
The “corrupt squadron” of speculators in Congress and
outside was assailed with every weapon of vituperation
known to men, and the secret sessions of the Senate were
fiercely attacked until that august body was forced to throw
open its doors, at least during the transaction of ordinary
business. Nor was Washington, the father of his country,
spared; his personal integrity was not laid under suspicion
but he got much of the ‘‘mud” aimed at Hamilton and felt
that “a common criminal” could fare no worse.

To the continuous flow of political rhetoric, the steadily
growing proportion of space devoted to domestic and for-
eign news afforded little relief for the news was all colored
by politics. Nothing but a few “features” really relaxed

506 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the tension. In 1793 an original columnist, the first per-
haps in the New World, Royall Tyler, novelist and dram-
atist, began to supply readers of the New Hampshire
Journal with witty comment on current events, while “A
Lay Preacher,” a forerunner of Dr. Frank Crane, gave vent
to moralizings on things in general. At last ‘‘wordless
journalism”’ definitely put in its appearance when in 1811
Benjamin Russell, a New England editor, brought out the
‘‘gerrymander’’ cartoon destined to endure for more than
a century—long after many a contemporary editorial on
the subject had been buried in the dust of decades. Ameri-
cans were beginning to laugh at themselves; by quip and
picture they could ease a bit the fierce strain of politics and
soften the terrors of hell.

CHAPTER XI

New Agricultural States

URING the years between the inauguration of
George Washington and the retirement of James
Monroe, the “agricultural interest’ was enlarging

its area, multiplying its adherents, and increasing its wealth.
When the first President of the United States took the oath
of office in Wall Street, there were thirteen states in the
Union; within a little more than three decades nine new
commonwealths had been erected in the Valley of the Miss-
issippi— Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana,
Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Missouri—and two on
the outskirts of New England—Vermont and Maine.
In the same eventful period the population of the coun-
try multiplied nearly three times; at its close there were
more inhabitants in Kentucky and Tennessee than in Mas-
sachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont
combined. With the movement of peoples and the rise
of new communities went of course a westward shift in
the center of political gravity.

At the end of Monroe’s administration Virginia, mother

507

508 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of Presidents, had to yield the scepter. Four years after-
ward Massachusetts was also forced to abdicate when her
conservative son, John Quincy Adams, who had won the
palm by an accident in the grand scramble of 1824, was
swept from the White House before the flood of western
Democrats headed by Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. The
political forces of agriculture which had driven from power
Hamilton’s party of finance, commerce, and industry in
1800 had now been made apparently invincible by recruits
from the frontier. |

No wonder the statesmen of ‘“‘wealth and talents”? were
in despair as they read the handwriting on the wall. At
the Hartford convention a decade before, the assembled
Federalists had prophesied that the admission of new west-
ern states would destroy the delicate balance between the
planting and the commercial sections, that the planting in-
terest allied with the western farmers would for a time
govern the country, and that finally the western states, mul-
tiplied in number and augmented in population, would con-
trol the interests of the whole. To ward off this disaster
the soothsayers of calamity had then offered ingenious paper
projects in the form of constitutional amendments but words
could not stifle the earth hunger of the multitudes nor bar
the gates to them.

Through the years the tide of migration rolled westward,
leaving in its wake widespreading farms and plantations
whose owners, organized in political communities, worked
hard at getting and using their full share of political power
in the government of the nation. And their labors were
not without reward. Of the fourteen Presidents of the
United States elected between the passing of John Quincy
Adams and the coming of Theodore Roosevelt, all except
four, were either born in the Mississippi Valley or were,
as residents, from early life identified with its people and its
interests.

§

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 509

This westward migration—far greater in volume than
the invasion that peopled the hills of New England and the
lowlands of Virginia—was in one respect distinguished from
other significant movements of colonizing races. The Eng-
lish settlements of the Atlantic seaboard were established
under the patronage of powerful companies or semi-feudal
proprietors encompassed by the protecting arm of a strong
and watchful government. In striking contrast, the move-
ment that carried American civilization beyond the Appa-
lachians was essentially individualistic. No doubt, land
companies helped to blaze the westward way, but they were
few in number and their role in the process of occupation
was relatively unimportant, especially after the initial steps
were taken. It must be conceded also that little associa-
tions of neighbors from time to time detached themselves
from the older Atlantic communities and went in groups
over the mountains, but their adventures, like the under-
takings of corporations, were mere eddies in the swarming
migration that filled the continental empire. In the main,
the great West was conquered by individuals or, to speak
more accurately, by families.

When pioneers from English communities on the coast
first began to open paths toward the Mississippi, the west-
ern region was a wilderness in which several seaboard
colonies had conflicting legal rights under charters and
grants from kings of England. ‘Though the claimants, for
many reasons, including the royal proclamation of 1763
closing the frontier to easy settlement, did little to develop
their estate, its value was appreciated, if not by the
commonalty, at least by statesmen and by investors with an
eye to fortunate land speculations.

By no accident, accordingly, on the outbreak of the Revo-
lution, George Rogers Clark, at the head of an armed expe-
dition, was dispatched into the West for the purpose of
wresting from the Ohio country the grip of England. As
contemplated, the stroke was effective. While negotiating
the treaty of peace with Great Britain at the close of the

510 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

war for independence, the American delegation was able
to clinch the achievement by fixing the western boundary
of the United States at the Mississippi River.

Meanwhile, a lively contest arose in America over the
fruits of victory. ‘The politicians in control of the states
that had claims, good and bad, naturally wanted to direct
the disposal of the western lands and to recoup from that
source at least some of the expenses of the struggle against
Britain. But the politicians in other states, bitterly re-
senting this monopoly, declared that the Northwest had
been won by common sacrifices and demanded equal shares
in the fruits of victory. Finally, after much wrangling the
principle of national ownership was adopted and the sev-
eral claimants, sometimes with specific reservations, ceded
their holdings to the United States.

The government to which this huge domain was trans-
ferred, namely, the Congress created by the Articles of Con-
federation, though too feeble to execute any grand plan of
colonization, prepared the way for individual and corporate
action by creating some of the conditions necessary to effec-
tive occupation. By two remarkable ordinances enacted in
1784 and 1785 it set momentous precedents for the North-
west Territory.

In the first of these decrees the Congress enunciated the
fateful principle that the territories to be organized in the
West should be ultimately admitted to the Union as states
enjoying all the rights and privileges of the older common-
wealths—not kept in the position of provinces in another
Roman Empire ruled by pro-consuls from the capital. The
second ordinance made provision for the official surveys
which were to carve out farms, towns, counties, and states
on a rectangular, or checker-board, pattern. With respect
to actual settlement the Congress also arranged for the
sale of lands so that pioneers and speculators could acquire
holdings by lawful procedure and acquire titles of unim-
peachable validity. ‘These measures, excellent as they
were, left out of account, however, one important factor,

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 511

namely, an efficient government for the Northwest Terri-
tory—one which could hold Indians, squatters, and out-
laws in check and assure investors and farmers the peace-
ful possession of their property. Until this crowning
measure of preparation was passed, successful colonization
on a large scale could not be undertaken.

At last under the sharp pressure of private enterprise
the missing factor was supplied. In March, 1786, a num-
ber of New England citizens, many of them veterans of the
Revolutionary War, met in Boston and organized an Ohio
land company for the purpose of buying a huge tract in the
Northwest. After perfecting their plans, they sent spokes-
men, led by the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, to New York
to make the necessary arrangements with the Congress of
the United States, arrangements which included, besides
a cession of land, the creation of an efficient territorial gov-
ernment.

To their amazement these far-seeing promoters met
neglect and indifference in Congress until they secretly
agreed that several of its influential members should share
in the profits of the transaction. With more precision than
was customary with the authors of Puritan sermons, the
Rev. Mr. Cutler entered a description of the operation
upon the pages of his personal journal: “We obtained the
grant of near five millions of acres . . . one million and a
half for the Ohio company and the remainder for a private
speculation, in which many of the principal characters of
America are concerned. Without connecting this specula-
tion, similar terms and advantages could not have been
obtained for the Ohio company.” ‘The price to be paid
for the land was fixed at a figure that promised to net
the government about eight or nine cents an acre in specie.
The scheme of administration was provided by the Congress
in the now famous ‘“‘Ordinance for the Government of the
Territory of the United States Northwest of the Ohio.”

This memorable document provided for the temporary
control of the Northwest by a governor, a secretary, and

‘512 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

judges fully empowered to make laws and enforce them.
Incidentally members of the Congress and managers of the
Ohio land company who had engineered the project be-
came the official rulers of the whole domain. General
Arthur St. Clair, president of the Congress, who, after
much persuasion, had helped to get the requisite measures
through the legislative body over which he wielded the
gavel, received as a reward, besides stock in the enterprise,
the salaried post of governor in the Northwest Territory.
Two of the company’s directors were appointed judges to
serve with St. Clair, the three constituting in effect the con-
solidated legislative, executive, and judicial departments of
the western province.

Besides making these provisional arrangements, the
Ordinance also prepared for the long future. It stipulated
that as soon as there were five thousand free males in the
territory a popular assembly should be established, male citi-
zens owning fifty acres of land to enjoy the right of suffrage.
Religious freedom was guaranteed, the historic safeguards
of jury trial, approved judicial procedure, and the writ of
habeas corpus were assured to all the people, and the estab-
lishment of schools and the promotion of education encour-
aged. In the spirit of the new humanism slavery and in-
voluntary servitude were solemnly forbidden. Echoing the
recent reforms made by Jefferson in Virginia, the accumula-
tion of fortunes under the ancient law of primogeniture was
blocked by a provision that estates should be divided among
the children of deceased persons in equal parts, saving the
rights of widows. Finally, the territories to be formed in
the region were in due time to be admitted to the Union
on the same footing as the old states.

Such were the broad principles formulated to govern the
development of political communities in the West. They
were confirmed in 1789 by the Congress which assembled
under the Constitution of the United States. Except for
the ban on slavery, they were applied the following year to
the territory south of the Ohio ceded to the Union by

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 513

North Carolina and again in 1798 to the Mississippi
domain surrendered by Georgia.

With the question of government out of the way, the
next problem was the adoption of methods for selling west-
ern land to settlers and speculators. And it was a thorny
problem, involving Federalist and Republican theories of
state. It had long vexed the advisers of the British Crown
and it was to torment American politicians for more than
a century. With the refrain of 1776 still ringing in their
ears, the members of the Congress in their act of 1785,
already cited, had provided for selling western lands in lots
of 640 acres at a minimum fixed rate of one dollar per
acre in addition to certain administrative charges. But in
1796, after the ardor of early populism had cooled a bit,
Congress raised the price to two dollars and authorized
the sale by auction.

A part of Hamilton’s plan for raising revenues from
the public domain, this measure, by favoring the specu-
lator, or at all events the purchaser of large estates, and
failing to satisfy the demands of the farmer in search
of a little homestead, inevitably raised a tempest of criti-
cism from the followers of Jefferson. After four years of
agitation, Congress made concessions by opening land offices
in the West for the convenience of buyers on the spot.
Still the cry of the poor man was heard, growing louder
and louder, until at length in 1820 Congress was compelled
to provide for the sale of land in blocks as small as eighty
acres at not less than $1.25 an acre. That reform won, the
advocates of free homesteads now made their voices heard
above the din of Washington politics, again and again, until
they were finally silenced by the coveted act of Congress.
Thus the drift of public policy—in accord with Jeffersonian
political economy—was against the establishment of im-
mense estates tilled by tenants. Even the speculators and
companies that bought in large quantities could not develop
their holdings by servile labor or retain their purchases for
long periods. ‘They were in fact forced to sell in small

514 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lots on reasonable terms to actual settlers, contributing in
this way to the process by which the small freehold of sixty,
eighty, or one hundred and sixty acres, tilled by the farmer
and his family, became the typical unit of agriculture in the
Northwest.

§

It was a marvelous empire of virgin country that awaited
the next great wave of migration at the close of the
eighteenth century. As the waters of the Tigris, the
Euphrates, and the Nile had invited mankind to build its
civilizations along their banks, in remote antiquity, so the
valley of the Mississippi now summoned the peoples of
the earth to make a new experiment in social economy in
the full light of modern times. And what a valley it was!
The Mississippi River and its tributaries carried a volume
of water greater than that of all the rivers of Europe
combined, excluding the Volga.

In the widespreading basin was a climate for every
mood and temper, from the freezing winters of the lake
country to the semi-tropical summers of Alabama and Mis-
sissippi. There were soils and seasons for almost every
fruit, vegetable, and cereal that man or woman could de-
mand. There were forests of hard and soft woods adapted
to every kind of structure—homes, barns, factories, boats,
and barges. From the lakes to the gulf were scattered rich
beds of coal, iron, copper, and lead—prime materials for
those giant industries on which modern empires are built.
And what a theater for action! The nine states created
between the old colonies and the Mississippi River con-
tained a dominion greater than the combined area of Great
Britain, Germany, and Italy with the Netherlands and
Belgium added for good measure. In the Northwest Ter-
ritory alone, either France or Germany could be com-
fortably fitted with room to spare.

Into this new arena for enterprise four routes created
by nature led from the older states. To the South one

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 515

ran from Alexandria to Richmond and from Richmond
through the Cumberland Gap into the Kentucky country;
along this trail Daniel Boone had blazed the way as early
as 1769 and in the course of time it had been widened
into a wagon road. <A second route lay westward from
Alexandria over the mountains and across the Great Kana-
wha to Boonesboro. In the middle region, three roads,
starting from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Alexandria re-
spectively, converged on Pittsburgh, where the wide waters
of the Ohio River offered the emigrant an easy journey on
into the far country. To the north the Genesee road, be-
ginning at Albany, ran almost due west through level coun-
try to Buffalo, on Lake Erie, the principal gateway into the
upper reaches of the Northwest Territory.

Each of these natural routes to the West had its own
history. For a time the Cumberland road held the pri-
macy. [he region into which it led was at the beginning
under the governments of Virginia and North Carolina—
states that offered lands to settlers on easy terms and gave
them a precarious protection against the Indians. ‘The
road itself was very near the back doors of the upland
farmers in those states and it beckoned them on to a more
fertile soil than their plowshares had so far broken. More-
over, the advance of slave-owning planters from the coast
exerted a steady pressure on them, driving them to escape
by the Cumberland route from that invasion.

When the planting advance got into full swing and the
Northwest Territory was opened during the closing years
of the eighteenth century, the Ohio River route began to
gather an ever-larger portion of the emigrants. Although
the journey from the coast to Pittsburgh was beset by diffi-
culties, the rest of the way was easy, for as soon as the
immigrant family arrived at the headwaters of the Ohio,
it could buy almost any kind of boat for the remainder
of the trip—a light canoe for two or three or a ten-ton
barge that would carry a score of passengers with house-
hold goods, wagons, plows, and cattle down the river to

516 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the landing point nearest the chosen destination. And yet
before long the Ohio route was rivaled by competing lines
to the north, especially by the National Road, begun in
1806, and the Erie Canal, opened in 1825.

The story of the migration into the Mississippi Valley by
these various routes is an epic which has found no Homer;
but a hundred historians, professional and amateur, have
assembled the materials for use when the immortal bard
shall appear. Indian trails have been retraced, portage
paths uncovered, and old wagon tracks marked on the maps.
Archer Hulbert has plotted the first roads over which the
empire builders moved to the scenes of their new labors.
Local historical associations, crowned by the Mississippi
Valley Historical Society, have rescued from old chests and
lumber rooms yellow newspapers, faded letters, and saffron
diaries that tell of the marching pioneers who wrought for
themselves and their children’s children. Roosevelt with
his usual gusto wrote a long chapter of the story in six
volumes, bearing the somewhat misleading title of The
Winning of the West. Turner and his school of meticulous
workers have analyzed the influence of the advancing fron-
tier on the life and politics of the United States. If, in
their enthusiasm for a long-neglected subject, they have
pressed their argument too far, at all events they have
forced the historians of Puritans and Cavaliers to take note
of something more realistic than Sunday sermons and
armorial scrolls.

§

The rolling tide of migration that swept across the moun-
tains and down the valleys, spreading out through the
forests and over the prairies, advanced in successive waves.
In the vanguard was the man with the rifle—grim, silent,
and fearless. He loved the pathless forest, dense and soli-
tary, carpeted by the fallen leaves of a thousand years and
fretted by the sunlight that poured through the Gothic
arches of the trees, where the wild beast slunk through the

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES x17

shadows, where the occasional crash of a falling branch
boomed like thunder, and where the camp fire at night
flared up into the darkness of knitted boughs as the flaming
candles on the altar of a cathedral cast their rays high
into the traceries of the vaulted roof.

As he paddled his canoe along the winding rivers or
crept through the forest and canebrake, the hunter’s nerves
kept taut with watchfulness. His clear eye was quick to
discern the signs of his foe or prey and to find the rifle
range with deadly accuracy. The practiced muscles of his
sinewy arm could direct his long dirk with unfailing skill
to the vital spot whenever he came to close quarters with
an assailant. As alert as the deer he stalked and as silent
as the coiling snake that slid across his path, the hunter
carried on a dangerous craft against every kind of strata-
gem known to man or beast. If he heard what seemed to
be the call of a harmless bird or the hoot of an owl, he
dropped to earth and lay still as death, listening intently
until he could be sure that there were no false notes be-
traying the voice of an Indian poised in the forks of a tree
for a shot at him; for, in the long contest with the red
hunter for the spoils of the wilderness, he had learned the
terrible penalty that awaited the white man who neglected
the ways of the forest.

Unsocial as the rifleman was in his hunting habits, he
generally had a family on or near the frontier. With the
aid of his wife and children, he threw up a rude shelter,
often open on one side like the cabin in which Lincoln’s
mother died. He girdled and killed a few trees near by
and laid a rail fence around his lot. ‘There the family
planted a “‘truck patch” of corn, beans, turnips, cabbage,
and potatoes. While the hunter was searching for game
in the forests or fishing in some neighboring stream, the
wife and children vigorously hoed among the tangled roots
and tough grasses of the garden. When autumn came the
crops were harvested; the corn was stored in a rough crib;
the cabbages, turnips, and potatoes, bedded in straw, were

518 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

buried in great mounds from which the winter’s supply could
be taken. Wood for the big fireplace of sticks and clay
came from the forest’s edge. In all its phases the mode
of living was crude but it was far removed even so from
the depths of primitive culture.

If, amid these rough surroundings, the hunter himself
was content, it could not often be said that his wife was
equally satisfied with her share in the contest. Nearly
always she was a reluctant fugitive from a civilization of
a higher order and could not help pining for the softer
things of older societies. Usually she was a pathetic figure
in her coarse dress of linsey-woolsey and deep sunbonnet,
performing in terrifying loneliness the humble duties of
her household. Unlike the Indian woman, who was a part
of the nature in which she worked and had never known
the smoother paths of settled communities, the hunter’s
wife could seldom sink as quickly as her husband into the
ways and temper of the wilderness. But her lot was fixed
and she marched resolutely through the encircling shadows
of the frontier, taking fate as it came.

When by the immigration of settlers her forest home
began to take on some of the elements of civilization, her
hunter husband, finding his game supply diminishing, was
sure to grow restless and begin to talk of “going West.”
After much discussion, sometimes interspersed with lamen-
tation, he would induce or command his family “to pull up
stakes and strike for the tall timber.’’ After all, for him,
the migration was no great effort. Frequently he was a
mere squatter on land to which he had no title. If, under
the liberal preémption plan of the government, he had
valid claims, they were not worth much and he could
readily sell them to a newcomer on the scene. So with a
light heart he disposed of his cabin and clearing and with
his household turned his face toward the setting sun.

In the wake of the man with a rifle came the seekers of
permanent homes. In the Northwest, and usually in the
Southwest, the leader in this next phase of occupation was

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 519

the man with a plow, or, to speak more correctly, the fam-
ily with established habits of domestic economy—the farm-
ing group who understood and loved the steady and sober
industry of the field, the housewife who was a mistress of
the thousand arts that created comfort, security, and refine-
ment, and the rollicking children who made the frontier
ring with merriment and who helped to enrich their parents
as they grew in years. Immigrants of this type soon built
a fourth side to their abode and set in glass windows;
within a short time they substituted well-constructed frame
or brick dwellings for their first log cabins. They cleared
broad acres for tilling and combined with their neighbors
to open roads through the woods, fling rude bridges across
streams, and build churches and schoolhouses.

As the settlements of the county expanded into com-
pact farms they made provision for local government, erect-
ing a courthouse and log jail and choosing officers to
administer rough and ready justice in civil and criminal
cases. Before the first generation was ready to surrender
to the children, the county seat had usually grown into a
thriving village where, as a traveler through the Ohio
country in 1836 declared, ‘‘broadcloths, silks, leghorns,
crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivoli-
ties, and fashions are in vogue.”’ A few of the more in-
genious men developed into manufacturers and millers on a
small scale; business enterprise with all its implications
commenced.

Sometimes the family of this class remained rooted for
at least two or three generations in its first settlement; but
often it was quickly struck with the western fever and
moved on like the hunter in search of a new Eldorado. In
the far country it was not uncommon to find homesteaders
who had camped five or six times on their westward march.
Indeed, as the renewal of exhausted soil called for more
scientific knowledge than many a farmer could command,
migration to virgin country was the easiest way out of
poverty for the unskilled.

520 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

To the south of the Ohio River, the settlers who fol-
lowed the hunters were generally white farmers, akin in
spirit and purpose to those who peopled the Northwest
Territory. If the climate in some sections invited planters
to bring their slaves, the task of cutting forests, clearing
land, and making the beginnings of civilization usually of-
fered obstacles which they were not well fitted to surmount.
So the first drive into the southern wilderness was made
also by industrious white families and in the upland regions
of Kentucky and Tennessee they remained in permanent
possession of the soil. But close behind these home build-
ers, especially into the wider valleys and broader plains,
came masters with their slaves, buying up, uniting, and
enlarging the holdings of their forerunners. In this way
one of the distinctions that marked the old South from the
Northwest was widely carried into the lower Mississippi
Valley. Though, as southern observers were wont to say,
western masters were shrewder and less punctilious than the
grand gentlemen of the Virginia and Carolina lowlands,
they were all united by ties of common interest, particularly
on points touching their ‘peculiar institution.”

§

Considered in chronological order the history of the
westward movement presents two distinct phases: one rela-
tive to the occupation of the Kentucky and Tennessee re-
gion, the other to the settlement of the Northwest Terri-
tory. The first advance on the wilderness was made into:
the district south of the Ohio at a date somewhere in colo-
nial times not fixed in the chronicle of the West. Roosevelt
records that as early as 1654 ‘‘a certain Colonel Wood
was in Kentucky,” and that in 1750 Dr. Thomas Walker
of Virginia, ‘‘a genuine explorer and surveyor,” made his
way to the headwaters of the Kentucky, writing on his re-
turn an entertaining journal of his trip now available in
printed form. Ina few years more two Pittsburgh hunters,

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 521

Stoner and Harrod, were shooting buffaloes on the bend
of the Cumberland, near the site of Nashville.

In any case the path had been broken when in 1769 Dan-
iel Boone, with five companions, set out from his home on
the Yadkin and pushed resolutely westward until he passed
through the mountain fastness and out into the blue grass
region. Discovering there an abundance of game that filled
him with delight, round-horned elk, bears, and buffaloes,
Boone bore home such a tale as had never been told in the
hills of North Carolina. Inspired by his stories, other
hunters rushed to the West along the trail he had blazed,
pressing onward in their operations until they reached the
Mississippi and established connections with the French
trading posts on the river.

Immediately behind the forerunners came pioneers and
their families from Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia,
the major portion of them Scotch-Irish farmers seeking an
escape from the clay hills of their native states. In the
very year that Boone made his first trip over the moun-
tains, farmers from western Virginia planted a settlement
on the banks of the Watauga in eastern Tennessee, then
a part of North Carolina. Around blockhouses built along
the river, they grouped farms and log cabins, thus giving
to their contemporaries a demonstration in the difficult art
of combining dispersed agriculture with effective provisions
against hostile Indians.

In the middle of the next decade, Boone himself, in co-
operation with Henderson, a colossal speculator of North
Carolina, led a band of pioneers into Kentucky and founded
the post of Boonesboro. Even in the stormy days of the
Revolution the migration continued, and, after peace came,
it broke all precedents. By 1790 Tennessee had a popula-
tion of 35,000—while Kentucky reported twice as many, a
census return larger than that of Delaware or Rhode
Island, then more than a century old. The next year,
William Blount, federal governor of Tennessee, built his
capital on the banks of the Tennessee River and christened

522 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

it Knoxville in honor of Washington’s Secretary of War, a
good Federalist.

The second phase of the westward movement, namely, the
great migration into the Northwest Territory, opened under
more fortunate auspices. Settlers in the region south of
the Ohio had been compelled to do their work under the
protection of two rather indifferent parent states, whereas
the pioneers of the Northwest, coming later on the scene,
were able to invoke the armed might of the new federal gov-
ernment established under the Constitution. Not long after
his inauguration President Washington, himself a large
holder of western lands who appreciated the future of the
Ohio country, took vigorous measures to organize military
expeditions against the Indians on the frontier. His com-
mander, General Anthony Wayne, in many clashes with
these redoubtable foes of the white invasion, finally brought
the leading chieftains to their knees, forcing them in 1795
to sign a treaty which cleared the eastern and southern por-
tions of the Territory for white settlements. ‘Then, by a
process of steady pressure accompanied by some fighting,
section after section was wrested from the aborigines and
thrown open for occupation by farmers. Of course the
white rifleman in the vanguard long continued to come into
collision with the red man whose hunting ground he was
despoiling but after Wayne’s treaty there occurred in the
Northwest relatively few of those dreadful scenes which
had made Kentucky and Tennessee “a dark and bloody
ground.”

It was sheltered by the strong arm of the national
government that promoters of Manasseh Cutler’s land
company drove upward into the midlands of Ohio from
their base, Marietta, founded on the banks of the Muskin-
gum under the guns of Fort Harmar in 1788. It was with
less danger from the Indians than their ancestors had en-
countered at the hands of the Pequods that pioneers from
Connecticut commenced to the north the settlement of
Western Reserve, an immense domain which the state had

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES $23

retained on surrendering to the Union its historic claims.
Without fear, Moses Cleaveland, blazing a path to the
shores of Lake Erie, established in 1796 a post that was
destined to grow into a great city. From these beginnings
two prosperous colonies, both offshoots of New England,
rose and flourished.

With faithful precision the town meeting, the Congrega-
tional Church, steady-going habits, and Massachusetts
thrift were reproduced beyond the mountains, as land-
hungry sons and daughters of the Puritans advanced rapidly
on the Mississippi, dispersing widely in northern Ohio, Indi-
ana, and Illinois, upward into southern Michigan and Wis-
consin and westward toward the great plains. So with
accuracy could Webster declare in his magnificent oration
delivered on the two hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’
landing: ‘‘New England farms, houses, villages, and
churches spread over and adorn the immense extent from
the Ohio to Lake Erie and stretch along from the Alleghany
onwards, beyond the Miamis, and towards the Falls of St.
Anthony. ‘Two thousand miles westward from the rock
where their fathers landed, may now be seen the sons of
Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and vil-
lages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of
wise institutions, of liberty, and religion. . . . Ere long the
sons of the Pilgrims will be on the shores of the Pacific.”

Not a whit behind New England, the middle and south-
ern states furnished their quotas for the conquest of the
northwest wilderness. In a huge tract acquired by the
mighty speculator, J. C. Symmes, New Jersey folk estab-
lished a colony at Cincinnati, so named in honor of the many
soldiers who took part in the early settlement. Having
merely to open their back doors to reach the frontier, Penn-
sylvania and New York sent settlers into nearly every com-
munity beyond the mountains.

From the South, especially the piedmont of North Caro-
lina and Virginia, poured a stream of families already
inured to the hardships of pioneer life. Some were Quakers

524 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

from upper counties of the old North State recoiling before
the overbearing power of the slavocracy. Others were
nomadic prospectors, such as Lincoln’s father and mother,
who, growing weary of ill-requited labors on impoverished
soil in the East, rolled onward with the tide. Indeed, the
southern part of Indiana and Illinois was largely peopled
by men and women from Kentucky, Virginia, and North
Carolina, who placed their stamp indelibly upon the econ-
omy, culture, and politics of that region. Under their coon-
skin caps, the principles of Jeffersonian Democracy were to
be found with the same regularity as the doctrines of Fed-
eralism among the dyed-in-the-wool Puritans from Massa-
chusetts and Connecticut who laid out their prim townships
to the north. There were many exceptions of course, but
astute politicians knew how to handle them.

By the Old World, as well as the seaboard states of the
New, contributions were made to the development of the
West. English travelers and capitalists, looking for larger
opportunities, visited every important section of the Mis-
sissippi Valley during the years at the turn of the century,
many of them casting in their lot with the makers of the
young society on the frontier. The English book market
was soon well stocked with pamphlets, handy guides, and
pretentious volumes giving accounts of the journey from
“the old country” to ‘‘the log cabin in the clearing” and
every ship bore English immigrants bound for the western
valleys. From the Continent came an ever-increasing host
of Germans who scattered widely over the Northwest
Territory and across the Mississippi into Missouri. A band
of Swiss founded the town of Vevay on the Ohio River
while some French settlers were induced by land specu-
-lators to try their fortunes in the fertile region which
Marquette and La Salle had explored more than a century
before.

The rapidity with which these immigrants from all quar-.
ters subdued the wilderness almost passes belief. In 1775
there were not more than five thousand whites in the Missis-

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES a5

sippi Valley, outside New Orleans, and they were mainly
French families clinging to their old posts. In 1790 there
were about 110,000 white people in that region; within
another decade the number rose to 377,000. ‘The national
census of 1830 gave 937,000 to Ohio, 348,000 to Indiana,
157,000 to Illinois, 687,000 to Kentucky, and 681,000 to
Tennessee. In short, within the forty years after the
heavy migration began, the western territory acquired
more inhabitants than the original thirteen colonies in
a century of development under the stimulus and patron-
age of governments, companies, and proprietors; more than
Canada in the hundred years following the British conquest
of that great dominion. Nothing like it had yet occurred
in the stirring annals of American settlement.

It was in fact a momentous mass movement. Beginning
in 1787 a steady surge of pioneers for the West passed
through Pittsburgh; in that year, it is recorded, ‘‘more than
nine hundred boats floated down the Ohio carrying eighteen
thousand men, women, and children and twelve thousand
horses, sheep, and cattle, and six hundred and fifty wagons.”’
Travelers tell us that the roads were crowded with immi-
grants on foot and in wagons, marching west in high hope
or with grim determination to win or die. Whole com-
munities in the East were stripped of their inhabitants, as
the nomadic fever spread.

While the nineteenth century was still a bantling, the
Yankee missionary, Timothy Flint, was lamenting, in the
vein of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, that New England,
forsaken in the westward rush, was destined to decay.
“Our dwellings, our schoolhouses, and churches will have
mouldered to ruins,” he exclaimed, ‘‘our graveyards will
be overrun with shrub oak; and but here and there a
wretched hermit, true to his paternal soil, to tell the tale
of other times.” If the prophecy was a bit strained, it
breathed the fears of the age.

By 1830 the banks of the Ohio River were strewn with
flourishing villages and aspiring cities while the country to

526 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the south and north was dotted over with prosperous com-
munities. Wheeling, Marietta, Newport, Cincinnati, Madi-
son, and Louisville, alive with tourists and traders, were
dreaming of greater days to come. Cincinnati had 26,000
inhabitants. Dayton, the other terminus of the Miami
Canal, was a booming town of 2900. Sandusky, one of
the chief points of distribution for the migration of the
East by way of Buffalo, was growing like a reed. Cleveland
was a lively village expecting to become a metropolis as soon
as the canal under construction between Lake Erie and the
Ohio could be opened for traffic.

In Indiana the most populous town, Madison, with 2000
inhabitants, was even then noted “for the quantity of pork
barrelled there.”’ On the central border not far from the
Ohio line, Quakers from Pennsylvania and North Carolina
had built the stable settlement of Richmond. Indianapolis,
with 1200 residents, was already determined to become the
capital of the state. On the banks of the Wabash, Vin-
cennes, ‘‘the oldest place in the western world after Kas-
kaskia,’”’ was assuming an air of antiquity. Logansport,
Terre Haute, Crawfordsville, and Lafayette were rising
in the forests. Robert Owen’s communistic colony, ‘“‘New
Harmony,” having made the great experiment, had turned
back to the ways of individualism. Throughout Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky wild animals had practically
disappeared from the regions around the settlements;
wolves sometimes swept down to carry off a sheep or a hog
and a big bear occasionally was discovered in the family
larder seeking honey; but very few dangerous beasts re-
mained to beset the unwary traveler, at least on his way
along the roads and blazed trails.

§

As may be imagined from this sketch of its origins, the
civilization of the new West was a checkered pattern full
of surprises and contradictions. The many contemporaries

—————

a i

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES $27

who tried to describe it found colors, shades, and tints to
please their varied fancies. Timothy Dwight, president of
Yale and a rabid opponent of Jefferson, crisply declared
that most of the pioneers who went from his region into
the Ohio country were little better than anarchists; perhaps
having in mind the leveling tendencies of small farmers.

‘“They are,” he said, “not fit to live in regular society.
They are too idle; too talkative; too passionate; too prodi-
gal, and too shiftless to acquire either property or character.
They are impatient at the restraints of law, religion, or
morality; grumble about the taxes by which Rulers, Minis-
ters and School-masters are supported and complain inces-
santly, as well as bitterly, of the extortions of mechanics,
farmers, merchants and physicians, to whom they are always
indebted. At the same time they are usually possessed, in
their own view, of uncommon wisdom; understand medical
science, politics, and religion better than those who have
studied them through life; and although they manage their
own concerns worse than other men, feel perfectly satisfied
that they could manage those of the nation far better than
the agents to whom they are committed by the public. . . .
After censuring the weakness, and wickedness of their su-
periours; after exposing the injustice of the community in
neglecting to invest persons of such merit with public offices;
in many an eloquent harangue, uttered by many a kitchen
fire, in every blacksmith’s shop, and in every corner of the
streets; and finding all their efforts vain; they become at
length discouraged; and under the pressure of poverty, the
fear of a gaol, and the consciousness of public contempt,
leave their native places, and betake themselves to the
wilderness.”’ In this fashion, thought the good college
president, the sober and respectable people of the East,
rid of village Gracchi, could enjoy peace and quiet—and
they did until at last the terrible earthquake of Jeffersonian
Democracy shook down the Federalist temple about their
ears.

On the opposite side of the ledger could be placed the

528 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

verdict of another New England clergyman, Timothy Flint
—that veteran missionary who lived for many years on the
frontier and traveled it from end to end. Knowing the
pioneers personally in their new homes, he felt moved to
repel the imputations of the “learned and virtuous Dr.
Dwight.” Though he admitted that there were worthless
people in the West—‘‘and the most so, it must be confessed,
are from New England’’—he drew a picture of the frontier
which was sympathetic and on the whole favorable. “It is
true there are gamblers, and gougers, and outlaws; but
there are fewer of them, than from the nature of things and
the character of the age and the world, we ought to expect.
. .. The backwoodsman of the West, as I have seen him,
is generally an amiable and virtuous man. His general
motive for coming here is to be a freeholder, to have plenty
of rich land, and to be able to settle with his children about
him. It is a most virtuous motive. And notwithstanding
all that Dr. Dwight and Talleyrand have said to the con-
trary, I fully believe that nine in ten of the emigrants have
come here with no other motive.”

Having rendered this opinion in general, Flint explained
that the man who had wrestled with bears and panthers and
had passed his days in constant dread of Indians was of
necessity accustomed to carry a dirk and rifle, to stalk about
with a pack of dogs at his heels, and wear the rough gar-
ments of the woods. But everywhere, continued the mis-
sionary, the stranger was greeted with rude hospitality,
springing from an innate gentleness of manner. ‘The some-
what ungracious ‘‘Yes, I reckon you can stay all night”? was
merely a laconic way of putting the best at the disposal of
the wayfaring man. While the housewife was ‘‘timid, silent
and reserved” and declined to sit at the table, she gave un-
stinted attention to the slightest wish of the visitor. Money
in payment for food and shelter was spurned by the host
and hostess; even the children that gathered at the door to
speed the parting guest turned away from the proffered
coin. If the people who fled from the ministrations of the

a al in a i

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES g29

good and wise were originally the wretches portrayed by
Dr. Dwight, then the wilderness must have had a re-
demptive influence on their natures.

In religion the western regions were naturally as diverse
as the people who settled them. ‘The Scotch-Irish who
moved over the mountains into the Holston and Tennessee
Valleys were, of course, still Presbyterians in creed; as soon
as a frontier settlement was well-established, a committee
was chosen to build a church, select a preacher, and manage
the finances of the enterprise. In a similar fashion, the
emigrants from New England who went into the Ohio
country erected a Congregational church in every township
they occupied; while the Quakers made their plain meeting
house the center of their community life on the frontier.
At the old French posts that stood out occasionally like
hulks of sunken ships in the midst of the British flood,
Catholic priests continued to baptize, marry, confess, warn,
absolve, and bury according to the rites of their historic
Church. Wherever the Germans settled, the Lutheran
faith flourished; while here and there Episcopalian clergy-
men undertook the care of souls in a climate none too favor-
able for their colder ceremonials.

Beside the pastors of established congregations were de-
voted missionaries of every sect. The girdled trees of the
advancing frontier were hardly dead when wandering
preachers appeared to save men and women from the
danger of relapsing into barbarism. Especially numerous
and powerful were Methodist and Baptist itinerants who
proclaimed a passionate gospel of hell-fire and salvation
that moved the hardest drinkers, boldest fighters, and mean-
est sinners of the hinterland to repentance, periodically at
any rate. Into the most remote spots they penetrated, lay-
ing out regular circuits from community to community so
that the seed once planted might be carefully cultivated.
To fortify the faithful and gather recruits into the fold
they held great “‘camp meetings’ to which settlers flocked
from near and far for a season of singing, preaching, and

530 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

testifying—ceremonials that often flowed over into shout-
ing, dancing, screaming, fainting, and other excesses, as
religious ecstasy seized the more exuberant of the assembled
hosts.

In spite of theological differences a strong note of Puri-
tanism characterized the preaching of all denominations.
Methodists denounced dancing, card-playing, and jewelry
almost as fiercely as they did drunkenness and profanity.
The Congregational missionary, Timothy Flint, though
somewhat more liberal in his views, complained that
every German farmer had a distillery and that ‘‘the perni-
cious poison, whiskey, dribbles from the corn.’ But when he
remonstrated with them, the Germans always replied, that,
“while they wanted religion and their children baptized and
a minister as exemplary as possible, he must allow the
honest Dutch, as they call themselves, to partake of the
native beverage.” The Quakers—even those who liked a
“night-cap” of good whiskey—would have no ‘‘godless”
musical instruments in their meeting-houses and their solemn
garb marked them as censors of the wicked world in which
they had no part.

Even laymen joined in the Puritan crusade. Mrs. Trol-
lope, under the head of literature and prudery, declared that
a scholarly gentleman in Cincinnati once exclaimed to her:
“Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and thank God we are
sufficiently advanced to have found it out.’”’ At all events,
in that city, billiards and card-playing were then unlawful
and dancing was viewed with much disfavor. A young
German of good breeding gravely offended one of the best
families by speaking of ‘‘corsets’’ in the presence of ladies
and the manager of a public garden who put up a signboard
bearing the figure of a Swiss maiden in short skirts was
forced by the outraged women of the community to have
a flounce painted on her ankles. Such was the delicacy to
be found in a country where boisterous profanity and hard
drinking were as common as sunshine—profanity and drink-
ing so shocking that Flint was once moved to distribute

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 531

among the teamsters of his wagon train copies of “that
impressive tract, the ‘Swearer’s Prayer.’ ”

Harsh and grinding as life was on the frontier and puri-
tanical as were the devout, there were signs of intellectual
interest and craving even in the early days. ‘The very first
band of hunters who went through the Cumberland Gap
into Kentucky in 1769 carried with them two volumes of
Jonathan Swift’s Works and whiled away long nights
around the camp fire reading the diverting Gulliver’s
Travels. In August, 1787, when Lexington was but a
few years old, an editor, bearing the goodly English name
of John Bradford, brought out the first newspaper beyond
the mountains, The Kentucky Gazette; and four years later
The Knoxville Gazette, under the patronage of the gov-
ernor of Tennessee, issued a ringing Federalist challenge
to all Jacobins and Democrats.

In fact as soon as any village could boast of a few hun-
dred inhabitants and give promise of a future, some enter-
prising printer appeared with press and type to establish
his sanctum in a log cabin. In little weekly sheets, the
spleen of the politicians was vented, sermons were reported,
and budding poets were allowed to address the muses. With
the clergymen and the editors went the lawyers. In every
county seat attorneys did a thriving business defending crim-
inals and settling disputes over land titles. Their
professional labors they supplemented by delivering to
order turgid and high-sounding orations on the Constitu-
tion, the genius of Washington, or the spirit of American
institutions.

Nor was the training of the young wholly neglected in
the tough battle for a livelihood. Those wise statesmen of
the East who foresaw the future of the West had early
given thought to the education of the people. The ordi-
nance of 1785 set aside in the Northwest Territory a great
reservation of land for the support of elementary and
higher education. Supplementing this act, the Northwest
Ordinance two years later declared that “religion, morality

532 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and knowledge being necessary to good government and
the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of educa-
tion shall be forever encouraged.”

In the same spirit the territories and states erected in
the region set aside land for educational purposes; the con-
stitution of Indiana, for instance, proclaiming in 1816 that
the funds derived from the sale of public land dedicated to
education ‘“‘shall be and remain a fund for the exclusive
purpose of promoting the interest of literature and the
sciences and for the support of seminaries and public
schools.’ But fine declarations such as these, while they
expressed excellent intentions, were difficult to realize.
Much of the land set aside for education was sold at low
figures by corrupt or careless officials and no small part of
the money was lost through inefficiency and maladministra-
tion. It was not until the middle of the century that the
public school system of the middle west was placed on a
solid foundation.

More prosaic and complicated than public documents
would lead us to believe was the real story of frontier
education. As on the seaboard, it opened with a record of
private and sectarian effort. ‘The Presbyterian preachers
who went into the early communities of Kentucky or Ten-
nessee generally played the triple role of farmer, parson,
and schoolmaster; emigrant bands from New England into
the Ohio country usually took teachers with them; but
many a frontier settlement was long without a school of
any kind until some of the more energetic citizens took up
subscriptions, built a log house, and engaged a master.

Here and there ‘‘seminaries”’ of higher learning arose to
keep the lamp burning after the example of the Fathers on
the Atlantic coast. At Lexington, Kentucky, in 1807,
Cuming, an English traveler, found in Transylvania Univer-
sity a flourishing institution deserving commendation. The
president, Rev. James Blythe, according to the report,
taught natural philosophy, mathematics, geography, and
English grammar; another clergyman was professor of

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES Ei

moral philosophy, belles lettres, logic, and history; there
was also a professor of languages, one of medicine, and one
of law. Enthusiasm was great but salaries low. The pro-
fessor who taught French would have starved to death if
he had not supplemented his “university” stipend by fees
from a dancing class. ‘And here,” the tourist adds in an
aside, “it may not be impertinent to remark that in most
parts of the United States teachers of dancing meet with
more encouragement than professors of any species of
literary science.’ Not far from this university, the English
wayfarer found an academy where young ladies were taught
reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, elocution,
rhetoric, ancient and modern history, natural history, moral
philosophy, music, drawing, painting, fancy work, plain sew-
ing, and other appealing subjects.

Before the nineteenth century was far advanced, Timothy
Flint, with a pride worthy of John Harvard, could record
that there were six colleges in Ohio: Miami at Oxford, Ohio
University at Athens, Kenyon at Gambier, Western Reserve
at Hudson, Franklin at New Athens, and Lane Theological
Seminary for the Presbyterians at Cincinnati. In addition,
the missionary continued, there were fifteen or twenty
academies and each session of the legislature was incor-
porating a new one. On a journey farther west, Flint
visited Indiana College, opened in 1829 at Bloomington,
where, he said, ‘“‘a thorough classical education is imparted
at an expense as moderate as any similar seminary in the
Union.”

In backward regions, out of the range of organized in-
struction, women of breeding often taught untutored hus-
bands and stalwart children their letters and sent them
rejoicing through the gateway that led to books and papers.
For example, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee tailor, who
was fated to become President of the United States on the
death of Lincoln, learned the rudiments from his wife and
under her instruction unconsciously prepared for the career
marked out for him by destiny. Thus knowledge ad-

534 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

vanced slowly but steadily upon the ignorance of the hinter-
land—advanced because there was something more sub-
stantial in the fiber of the emigrants from the East than
the qualities listed by the excellent tutor, Dr. Dwight, or
the excesses of evangelistic revivals would seem to indicate.

§

The economy of the new West, essentially agricultural,
rested mainly upon a system of freehold farms. In the
lower Mississippi Valley and in the Missouri country, it is
true, the planters with their slaves early pushed out toward
the frontier; but in large sections of Alabama, Tennessee,
and Kentucky, and all through the Northwest Territory,
where slavery was forbidden, the small farmer reigned
supreme. In this immense domain sprang up a social order
without marked class or caste, a society of people substan-
tially equal in worldly goods, deriving their livelihood from
one prime source—labor with their own hands on the soil.

For a long time there were in that vast region no mer-
chant princes such as governed Philadelphia and Boston,
no powerful land-owning class comparable to the masters of
Hudson Valley manors. Even the slave owners of the gulf
states, though sometimes richer than their brethren on the
seaboard, were many years in acquiring the magnificent pre-
tensions that characterized the gentry of Virginia and South
Carolina. Sugar makers and cotton growers of the South-
west gave their section no Washingtons, Randolphs, Madi-
sons, and Monroes. Jefferson Davis belonged to the second
generation of Mississippi planters and by the time he grew
to manhood his class was marching swiftly to its doom.

- For many decades, an overwhelming majority of the
white men in the West were land-owning farmers. The
unit of their society was the family on the isolated holding
engaged in an unremitting battle with nature for its living.
No benevolent government surrounded it with safeguards;
no army of officials inspected its processes of life and labor.

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 535

In a thousand emergencies it was thrown upon its own
resources; it produced its own foodstuffs, manufactured
most of its own clothing, warded off diseases with home-
made remedies inherited from primitive women, and often
walked in the valley of the shadow of death without priestly
ministrations.

In its folkways and mores there was a rugged freedom—
the freedom of hardy men and women, taut of muscle and
bronzed by sun and rain and wind, working with their hands
in abundant materials, shaping oak from their own forests
and flax from their own fields to the plain uses of a plain
life, content with little and rejoicing in it, rearing in unaf-
fected naturalness many children to face also a career of
hard labor offering no goal in great riches or happiness in
a multitude of things—none servants of the machine with
their energies pinched by steel into fragile finery and their
days turned into night by the soot of chimneys—all satisfied
by the unadorned epic of Christianity inherited from their
fathers, with heaven not far away and a benign Providence
taking thought lest some sparrow might fall unnoticed.
Although travelers into the pioneer West disagreed on
many points they were almost unanimous in enumerating the
outstanding characteristics of the frontier people: independ-
ence in action; directness in manner, want of deference for
ceremony, willingness to make acquaintance with all sorts
and conditions of mankind, a rough and ready license of
speech with a corresponding touchiness of tempes in the
presence of real or fancied insults.

Nevertheless the men of the frontier were quick to asso-
ciate themselves in bodies politic, for besides bearing with
them from the older states traditions of self-government,
they were eager to safeguard their own interests against the
machinations of statesmen in the East. Above all things
they were keen to wrest control over the public lands from
the politicians at Washington who were as a rule either en-
gaged in speculation on a large scale or indifferent to the
needs and claims of the West. For these cogent reasons the

536 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

pioneers early resolved to have local autonomy, even if it
meant snapping the slender ties that bound them to the
Union.

Within fifteen years after Boone led his path-breaking
party to the West the question of separation became acute
in Kentucky. In 1785 a convention was held and a reso-
lution was passed declaring that Kentucky must separate
from Virginia and enter the Union as a state. During the
brief period of delay that ensued, some of the hot-heads
directed by James Wilkinson, a picturesque adventurer of
dubious morals, proposed to take matters into their own
hands and proclaim Kentucky independent in spite of Vir-
ginia or Congress. But calmer counsels prevailed. In
1792 after a season of agitation and in spite of the lamen-
tations of eastern Federalists, Kentucky found a seat in the
Union beside Vermont, admitted a year before.

Meanwhile a parallel movement was in full swing to
the south. In 1784 the frontier communities of Tennessee
elected a constitutional convention which met at Jonesboro
in midsummer and without a dissenting voice declared its
independence of North Carolina. A constitution was drawn
up, a legislature of two houses elected, and the new state
of Franklin, as it was called, announced to the public.
Immediate provision was made, by the establishment of an
academy, for “‘the promotion of learning.”’ As in the case
of Kentucky, a long controversy with the mother state now
followed.

At the close of the dispute the infant commonwealth gave
up the ghost but its fierce spirit of independence continued
to live until at last North Carolina, unable to manage the
tempestuous frontier, ceded the territory to the United
States. Though subjected by this act to the strong arm of
the national government, the pioneers in their passion for
self-zovernment refused to be balked. ‘They called another
convention, framed a second constitution, elected a gov-
ernor, chose two federal Senators, and sent Andrew Jack-
son, with his hair done up in an eelskin, to speak for the

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES bi

new state on the floor of the House of Representatives at
Philadelphia, still the capital of the nation. Their constitu-
tion was duly laid before Congress and after a brief tussle
between the Federalists and the Republicans, Tennessee
was admitted to the Union, in 1796.

Across the Ohio in the Northwest Territory, the appetite
for self-government was also keen. As a matter of fact,
two years before the Congress enacted the Ordinance of
1787 for the district, one John Emerson issued on his own
imperial authority a call to the squatters of the region to
assemble in convention and draft a government for them-
selves. In assuming this prerogative the true son of New
England declared that men “have an undoubted right to
pass into every vacant country and there to form their con-
stitution and that from the confederation of the whole
United States, Congress is not empowered to forbid them.”
But the doctrine was too strong for the times and the as-
sembly was never convened.

For nearly twenty years the district was held under na-
tional supervision until the population reached a figure more
appropriate to the position of a commonwealth. It was in
1803 that Ohio was admitted to the American federation
under a constitution framed with the consent of Congress.
A decade more passed and Indiana asked for a place in the
Union. In 1816 her constitution was drafted, the approval
of Congress obtained, and her government inaugurated at
Corydon. Illinois was next in the political arena and could
not be denied recognition. Under the spirited leadership
of a man born in New York and reared in Tennessee, a plan
of government was drawn up; in 1818 Congress admitted
the backwoods commonwealth to the privilege of statehood.

Before this time the appeal of the Far South had been
heard. By 1810 lower Louisiana claimed a population of
more than 75,000 and the people of the metropolis of
New Orleans, a center of trade and old Latin culture,
thought themselves not unworthy of a place beside Balti-
more and Boston. On the cession of the territory to the

538 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

United States seven years earlier a promise had been made
that the inhabitants should enjoy all the rights of American
citizens and in due course be taken into the Union as a
body politic equal in all respects to the elder members of
the national association.

The idea was naturally pleasing enough to the Repub-
licans at Washington, happy to be reinforced by new Sena-
tors and Representatives from the Southwest, but the Fed-
eralists, on their part, could hardly find words strong
enough to express their horror. When at length the bill to
admit Louisiana came before the House of Representatives
in 1811, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts declared that the
passage of the measure would be a virtual dissolution of the
Union, a death blow to the Constitution, and the signal for
some of the states ‘‘to prepare definitely for a separation,
amicably if they can, violently if they must.”

Reinforcing his protest, a committee of the legislature
of Massachusetts complained that “if the President and
Senate may purchase land and Congress may plant states
in Louisiana, they may with equal right establish them on
the North-West Coast or in South America.” However
faultless the logic may have been, it did not soften the hearts
of the Republicans. In 1812 Louisiana became the peer of
Massachusetts in spite of the latter's dread. Before an-
other decade elapsed, Mississippi and Alabama ‘poured
their wild men,” as the Federalists dubbed them, upon the
floor of the national Congress.

Far to the north in the Louisiana Purchase, another
commonwealth was rising to power on the banks of the
Missouri. Into the fertile lands of that region streamed
hardy farmers from Kentucky and Virginia, planters with
their slaves, land-hungry Yankees from New England,
thrifty Germans from Pennsylvania and straight from the
Old World—freemen and bondmen mingling in one effer-
vescent community. ‘Though differing in interests, in reli-
gion, and sometimes in language, all the white men were
agreed on one thing: winning independence as a state.

NEW AGRICULTURAL STATES 539

Pressing their claim upon Congress, they precipitated an
angry dispute over slavery, the first of the mighty debates
that finally culminated in an appeal to arms. On this occa-
sion a compromise staved off the storm; in 1820 Maine was
admitted into the Union as a free state and Missouri was
accepted with slavery, while through the remainder of the
Louisiana Territory the line of 36° 30’ was adopted to
mark the division between freedom and bondage. Before
the new legislature across the Mississippi had barely tried
its wings, some wag painted on the wall behind the speaker’s
chair: ‘‘Missouri, forgive them. ‘They know not what
they do.” So the new government was launched with humor
as well as with determination.

In fashioning their constitutions, the backwoods drafts-
men followed rather closely examples furnished by the older
states from which they had emigrated. Sometimes their
documents were almost exact copies of admired models.
Again they were mosaics; the leader in the Illinois conven-
tion, for instance, welded the constitutions of Kentucky,
Ohio, and Indiana into a composite law. In every case
there were included with mechanical regularity a bill of
rights and articles dealing with the executive, legislative,
and judicial departments. As a rule, however, the frontier
lawmakers stipulated that the governor should be elected by
popular vote and not by the legislature, as required by
the first constitutions in the majority of the original states;
and in several other respects the new commonwealths were
also more “democratic” in their politics.

Rejecting the doctrines of the Old Dominion, Kentucky
provided that all free male citizens who had resided in the
state for two years should enjoy the right of suffrage and
that any lawful elector should be deemed eligible for the
ofice of governor or membership in the legislature. Thus
was realized on the frontier the political equality of free-
men, in an age when property or taxpaying qualifications
were still retained by the commonwealths of the Atlantic
seaboard. Indeed the departure was too radical for some of

540 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Kentucky’s own neighbors. Tennessee, for example, in-
sisted on restricting important offices to freeholders, count-
ing no man eligible to the general assembly unless he owned
two hundred acres of land in the county which he repre-
sented or worthy to be elected governor unless he possessed
a freehold of five hundred acres. Furthermore, across
the Ohio River, Indiana, while giving the ballot to all white
male citizens, declined to allow any one who was not a tax-
payer to serve as a legislator or chief executive.

Yet, in spite of the property qualifications, even the high-
est, all the new western states were, broadly speaking, de-
mocracies of free and equal white men. It was indeed a
poor and shiftless pioneer who could not acquire a freehold
or become a taxpayer; in fact it was not very difficult to
secure the five hundred acres fixed as the economic qualifi-
cation for governor of Tennessee. So the politics of the
frontier was the politics of backwoodsmen, and if a type
of the age is needed for illustration, it may well be David
Crockett, whose autobiography is one of the prime human
documents for the American epic yet to be written.

In early manhood, without any formal education and
barely able to write his own name, Crockett was made a
local magistrate. Confessing at the time that he had never
read a page of a law book in his life, he gave his decisions
on “the principles of common justice and honesty between
man and man, and relied on natural born sense and not on
law learning’’ as a guide to his judgments. From this petty
office Crockett advanced to the state legislature. When the
new honor fell upon him, according to his own admissions,
he had never read a newspaper, and was under the impres-
sion that General Jackson himself was the whole govern-
ment of the United States. In his campaign for election,
Crockett told stories that amused the crowd; usually ending
his speech with the remark that he was “dry as a powder
horn’ and extending a general invitation for the auditors
to join him at the nearest liquor store.

On arriving at the capital of the state in the role of a

NEW (AGRICULTURAL STATES 541

Solon, Crockett was so ignorant of constitutional law that
he did not know the meaning of the word ‘“‘judiciary.’*
Undeterred, however, by a lack of training in books, he
widened his information, improved his handwriting, and
kept his wits burnished. In due time he was sent to Con-
gress where, for reasons difficult to fathom, he finally
turned against General Jackson and ruined his own political
career. Stung by defeat at the polls, Crockett now made
off for the southwest where he died dramatically at the
Alamo, helping to wrest an empire from the hands of the
Mexicans. No doubt other politicians from the West were
more learned and could make speeches in grammar more
elegant but on the whole Crockett was fairly typical of a
great horde of hunters and farmers who pushed into the
rude chambers of western capitals during the opening dec-
ades of the nineteenth century and sent their spokesmen to
Washington to instruct the federal government in the polli-
tics of frontier agriculture.

CHAPTER XII

Jacksonian Democracy—A Triumphant
Farmer-Labor Party

HE creation of nine states beyond the mountains,
accelerating the steady movement of political
power toward the West, was synchronous with
profound social changes on the seaboard—changes equally
disturbing to eastern gentlemen of the old school in wigs,
ruffles, knee breeches, and silver buckles. While the widen-
ing agricultural area was sending an ever-increasing num-
ber of representatives to speak for farmers upon the floor
of Congress, state after state on the Atlantic coast was
putting ballots into the hands of laborers and mechanics
whom the Fathers of the Republic had feared as Cicero
feared the proletariat and desperate debtors of ancient
Rome. Even Jefferson, fiery apostle of equality in the
abstract, shrank at first from the grueling test of his own
logic; not until long after the Declaration of Independence
did he commit himself to the dangerous doctrine of man-
hood suffrage.
Expressing their anxieties in law, the framers of the first

542

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY bas

state constitutions, as we have noted, placed taxpaying or
property qualifications on the right to vote. The more timid
excluded from public office all except the possessors of sub-
stantial property; and those who stood aghast at the march
of secularism applied religious tests that excluded from
places of political trust Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, and
scoffers who denied belief in hell. All people thus laid under
the ban of the law they regarded as socially unsafe. ‘The
tumultuous populace of large cities,’ ran the warning words
of Washington, ‘“‘are ever to be dreaded.’ In Jefferson’s
opinion also, ‘‘the mobs of the great cities” were ‘‘sores on
the body politic.”

Such was the prevailing view among the ruling classes of
the time and it was founded on no mere theories of state.
The conduct of the rioters in the days of the Stamp Act agi-
tation, the fierce treatment meted out to Tories in the years
of the Revolution, and the mass meetings of workingmen in
New York and Philadelphia when the first state constitu-
tions were being framed, all indicated that social forces of
unknown power were stirring beneath the surface of
society.

There was a brief period of peace and reaction while
the Constitution was being launched but that was the calm
before the storm. Washington had been safely installed
only a few weeks when the alarm bell of the French Revo-
lution gave the signal for an uprising of the sansculottes of
the western world. Before long, in all the cities of the
American seaboard, a movement for white manhood suf-
frage was in full swing. Indeed, the mechanics of Penn-
sylvania had already set an example in 1776 by forcing the
adoption of a low taxpaying franchise which gave a broad
popular base to the government and paved the way for a
Jacobinical democracy. During Washington’s first admin-
istration, in 1791, to be exact, Vermont came into the Union
without property restrictions, and Delaware gave the ballot
to all white men who paid taxes. Though reckoned among
the conservative states, Maryland ‘‘shot Niagara” in 1809

544 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

by adopting manhood suffrage; and nine years later Con-
necticut, even less devoted to the quest for novelties, decided
that all males who contributed a trivial sum to the support
of the government could be trusted with the ballot.

The fire spread to Massachusetts. Into the state con-
stitutional convention of 1820 strode radicals ready to strike
down all the political privileges expressly accorded to prop-
erty, raising anew the specter of Daniel Shays. Frightened
at their demands, Daniel Webster, then in the prime of his
manhood, and John Adams, at the close of his memorable
career, joined in protesting against innovations. With his
customary eloquence, Webster warned the convention that
all the revolutions of history which had shaken society to
its foundations had been revolts against property; that.
equal suffrage was incompatible with inequality in property;
and that if adopted it would either end in assaults on
wealth or new restraints upon democracy—a reaction of
the notables. In spite of the fact that the argument was
cogent, it did not rally the delegates as one man to the
established bulwarks. ‘The privileges of riches in the state
senate were indeed retained but the straight property test
for the suffrage was abandoned and a small taxpaying
restriction adopted, merely to be swept away itself within
a few years.

A similar contest took place in New York in 1821 whena
band of Federalists in the constitutional convention argued,
threatened, and raged to save the political rights of prop-
erty, only to go down in defeat after gaining some petty
concessions which were abolished within five years in favor
of white manhood suffrage. From this struggle echoes
were heard in Rhode Island where the mechanics of Provi-
dence, learning of ‘Tammany’s victory in New York, called
for a similar unhorsing of the freeholders who ruled their
own state. Unawed by their hue and cry, the conserva-
tives stood firm while the tiny commonwealth founded by
apostles of liberty was shaken by a long and stormy agita-
tion over the rights of man. For nearly twenty years the

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY | 545

tempest blew hard, provoking an armed uprising, known as
Dorr’s Rebellion, and culminating in the substitution of a
taxpaying for the freehold qualification on the suffrage.
Still more obdurate were Virginia and North Carolina,
notwithstanding the power of Jefferson’s great name; the
former would not let anybody but landowners vote until
1850; the latter did not surrender that restriction for six
years more. But the delay was not so significant, for the
growth of the western counties in those two states gave
them each a population of small farmers who had no more
love for the planters on the coast than the Irish mechanics
of New York City had for the stockholders in the United
States Bank. Thus it may be said that when the nineteenth
century turned its first quarter, political power was slipping
from the hands of seaboard freeholders, capitalists, and
planters into the grip of frontier farmers—usually heavily
in debt to the East for capital and credit—and into the
~ hands of the working class of the industrial towns, already
tinged with leveling doctrines from fermenting Europe.

§

As the cohorts of the new democracy marched in serried
ranks upon the government, they inevitably modified the
spirit and practice of American politics. First of all, they
criticized the method of electing the President. Shrinking
from the hubbub of popular agitations, the Fathers. had
sought to remove the choice of the chief magistrate as far
as possible from the passions of the multitude; though im-
pressed by the difficulties of the task they hoped to intro-
duce a quiet, dignified procedure about as decorous as the
selection of a college rector by a board of clerical trustees.
To attain their end, they provided that the President of the
United States and also the Vice-President should be care-
fully chosen by a small body of electors selected as the
legislatures of the states might decide.

Given this choice, the legislatures, naturally greedy for

546 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

power, proceeded to exercise the right themselves; but be-
fore long the new democracy was thundering at their doors,
demanding the transfer of that sovereign prerogative to the
voters at the polls. Slowly but surely the managers of poli-
tics yielded to the cry for the popular choice of the Presi-
dent; in 1824 only six states still allowed the legislatures
to choose the presidential electors and eight years later but
a single state, South Carolina, clung to the original mode.
One of the great safeguards against the tyranny of majori-
ties was now submerged in the tossing waves of democracy.

Yet the all-devouring populace was by no means satisfied
with this gain, for the nomination of party candidates for
President was still in the control of a small body of poli-
ticians known as the ‘‘congressional caucus.’ After the
country divided into two parties, it became necessary for
each of them to select its candidate in advance of the
election; but of course the rank and file of its personnel
could not assemble for that purpose in one forum, travel
being tedious and expensive even for exalted officers. Ac-
cordingly the party members in Congress simply took upon |
themselves the high function. When the season for choos-
ing the presidential candidate approached, the congressmen
of each party met in caucus behind closed doors and agreed
upon the dignitary to be put before the people. While
the election of President and Vice-President was passing
into popular control, the choice of candidates thus remained
in the grip of a few managers in Washington.

To the new democracy this situation was intolerable
and a roar of protest went up against it. In 1824, on the
refusal of “‘old King Caucus” to nominate General Andrew
Jackson, such a clatter was raised that never again did
members of Congress dare officially to select the people’s
candidates for them. When the campaign of 1832 came
_around, there was substituted for the caucus an institution
known as the nominating convention, an extra-legal party
conference composed of faithful delegates chosen by local
assemblies of loyal partisans. To be sure, Senators and

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY St

Representatives were always prominent in the convention
but they were now faced by hundreds of party agents
‘fresh from the people,” as Jackson was wont to say.

In fact, the grand convention was mainly ruled by office-
holders and aspirants for ofice. While the election of the
President was vested in the people legally, the choice of
candidates, in fact, passed from the congressional monop-
oly to professional politicians at large. This transfer was
noted by many eminent observers, especially by those who
failed to win a nomination; and soon the convention was
denounced in the vivid terms formerly applied to the
caucus. Nevertheless, the new party institution took root
and flourished; by 1840 it seemed as rigidly fixed as the
Constitution itself. It also became at the same time the
accepted organ of party operation in the lower ranges of
state and county politics. Men who refused to abide by
its decisions were anathematized and treated like social
pariahs. |

The profits as well as the powers of public office now
became objects of interest to the new democracy. ‘‘To
the victors belong the spoils,” a slogan of New York poli-
ticilans, was elevated to the dignity of a national principle
in the age of Andrew Jackson. And yet it would be a mis-
take to assume that the doctrine was a product of the
period. ‘To the statesmen of ancient Rome the emolu-
ments of office and the plunder of the provinces were mat-
ters of prime concern; the hands of the righteous Cicero
were far from spotless. [he government of England in
the era of the Georges was an immense aggregation of
sinecures and profitable positions, the impeccable Pitt hav-
ing his Newcastle to distribute pelf among the beggars of
the better sort that swarmed around Parliament.

In colonial America, contests over lucrative posts filled
official circles with petty rackets; the thrifty Franklin made
the most of his opportunity as royal postmaster-general of
America. Once independence was established, there were
problems of statecraft to be considered. Even the virtu-

548 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ous Washington, placed by a sense of honor and private
fortune above jobbery in public offices, could not ignore
its function in party management. In making his first
appointments, he was careful to choose friends rather than
enemies of the new Constitution, although he occasionally
tried to clip the wings of especially dangerous critics by
giving them places in the administration; and, taught by
experience the perils of doubters in his own household, he
finally vowed that he would henceforth select only well-
disposed persons for office, on the highly defensible theory
that no government can rely on its foes for success.
Jefferson was equally careful, when removals, resignations,
and deaths occurred, to make selections with reference to
party loyalty.

This practice the labor and agrarian democracy which
later swept into power merely amplified by ousting a-larger
proportion of office-holders and by avowing more frankly
that the sweets of place were among the joys of victory.
To this doctrine, they added another, namely, rotation in
office, demanding that terms be short so that more party
workers could share in the delights of conquest. The
bucolic openly admitted the purpose; while the sophisti-
cated argued that long tenure made officers lazy, bureau-
cratic, and tyrannical.

In either form the new gospel weighed heavily with
farmers who seldom saw as much as a hundred dollars cash
in the course of a whole year and with mechanics who
labored at the bench or forge for seventy-five cents a day.
To them a chance at the public “‘trough,” as the phrase
ran in gross colloquialism, was to be welcomed gratefully
on any axiom of ethics. Indeed, it was often difficult to
distinguish, except in mathematical terms, between those
who suffered from the taint of vulgarity in office-seeking
and those who united public emoluments and private re-
tainers in the higher ranges of the public service. What-
ever the niceties of the occasion required, it was clear to
all that the advent of the farmer-labor democracy was

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 549

bound to work changes in the more decorous proceedings
handed down from the Fathers.

§

The flow of time in which occurred these modifications
in American political life carried off the heroic figures of
the Revolution and left the race to the fleet men of a
new generation. Washington died in 1799, still “‘first in
the hearts of his countrymen,” as Light Horse Harry Lee
said in the funeral oration. Patrick Henry had already
gone to his long home; Samuel Adams was soon to follow.
In 1804, Alexander Hamilton, in the prime of life, was
shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, old and bent under the weight of years, trudged
on in the dusty way until 1826, when they died within a few
hours of each other on July 4, reconciled and at peace.
Charles Carroll, last surviving signer of the Declaration of
Independence, lived to turn the first sod for the Baltimore
and Ohio Railway on July 4, 1828, and to see with dimmed
eyes the outlines of a progressive future; but in four years
he too was no more. James Madison, philosopher of the
Constitution, kept up the good fight long enough to write
a ringing protest against nullification in South Carolina;
then death carried him off at the ripe old age of eighty-five.

When the election of 1824 arrived, there was no Father
of the republic, in the vigor of manhood and crowned with
the halo of a romantic age, able to take up the office laid
down by Colonel Monroe. Time as ever was ruthless.
The Virginia succession had come to an end. Even the
Federalist party, founded by Hamilton and Washington,
was out of the field—or rather incorporated as a disturbing
factor in the all-embracing Republican party of Jefferson.
The ‘‘era of good feeling” was closing; buried or concealed
hatreds were reviving. New men, looking to the future
rather than to the past, were jostling one another for
place and power in the forum, but none stood out head

550 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and shoulders above the others as the inevitable successor

to Monroe.

Puzzled by this state of affairs, the congressional caucus
nominated for the presidency W. H. Crawford of Georgia,
a man of ability but not a commanding personality. Its
decree was in regular form but it could not be enforced
because, forsooth, three other candidates insisted on enter-
ing the lists. John Quincy Adams, son of the second Presi-
dent, regarded himself as heir apparent in virtue of his
services as Secretary of State; while the frontier brought
its hard fist down on the political table with emphasis, an-
nouncing the rights of Henry Clay of Kentucky and Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee. ‘“The wild men of the Mississippi
region’ could not be ignored but fortune postponed their
mastery.

So divided were the returns from the polls that no one
of the four had a majority of the presidential electors as
required by the Constitution; Jackson stood at the top,
Clay at the bottom. From this it followed that the elec-
tion was thrown into the House of Representatives, where
each state could cast only one vote—the vote of its dele-
gation—and men elected in calmer days held the floor under
the leadership of Clay as Speaker. Upon the trained ears
of the old political dynasty, the cries of Jackson’s hordes
swarming into the lobbies sounded like the voices of willful
fanatics. Bent on defeating them at all costs, Clay, whose
small number of votes left him outside the pale, threw his
strength heavily to the right and by skillful management
won the presidency for Adams with the office of Secretary
of State for himself, perhaps, as alleged, quite accidentally.

Though the roaring flood of the new democracy was now
foaming perilously near the crest, the great dike of pro-
scriptive rights still held, for Adams could no doubt give to
the government the tone of the old régime. He called him-
self a Republican in politics, having turned against the Fed-
eralists and affliated with the Jeffersonians in the days when
the latter were regarded by the New England aristocracy

a =

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 551

as ‘‘a Jacobinical rabble.” Nevertheless, he was no horny-
handed farmer, aproned mechanic, or bold Indian fighter,
dear to the rising electorate of the age. Educated at
Harvard and in the politest circles of Europe, Adams
viewed public service as a kind of noblesse oblige to be kept
untainted by the vulgar odors of loot and spoils—a service
capable of protecting democracy by efficient administration
against the inroads of the plutocracy.

Besides being out of lockstep in matter of political pat-
ronage, he was opposed to flinging western land out to
impecunious members of Congress, avid speculators, and
gambling farmers. Looking to the long future, he believed
in preserving the public domain as a great national treasury
of resources to be wisely and honestly managed with a view
to revenues for roads, canals, and education in letters, arts,
and sciences. Besides anticipating by nearly a hundred
years some of the most enlightened measures of conserva-
tion, Adams foresaw in a livid flash the doom of slavery in a
social war.

By no possible effort could he become a Jacksonian
‘“‘mixer’’; like his illustrious descendant, Henry Adams, he
was destined to wander in space without finding rest or
peace. From the beginning to the end of his administra-
tion, misfortune dogged his steps. When he appointed
Clay head of the State Department, the resentment of
Jackson’s party broke all bounds, worshipers of ‘Old
Hickory,” seeing in the appointment conclusive proof that
a “corrupt bargain’ had defeated their Hero. With a
feeling of righteous indignation, they began to prepare for
the next election, filling Adams’ four years with tor-
ment by abuse and with chagrin by gathering in his friends
as they fled from the sinking ship. In a tidal wave the
country repudiated Adams at the next election.

The campaign of 1828 was marked by extreme rancor—
a bitterness akin to that of 1800 when the Jeffersonian
hordes drove the elder Adams from power. Metropoli-
tan newspapers, the clergy, federal office-holders, manufac-

$52 THE RISE OF AMERICAN “GIVILIZATION

turers, and bankers were in general hotly in favor of re-
electing Adams; the richest planters of the Old South pre-
ferred him to Jackson, even if they had little love for a
New England Puritan himself. Against this combination
were aligned the farmers, particularly those burdened with
poverty and debts, and the mechanics of the towns who
shouted their “Hurrah for Jackson!” with a gusto.

Passions of rank and place, rather than definite issues,
divided the two factions and in the mad scramble for power
both resorted to billingsgate of the most finished quality.
Though garbed in the mantle of respectability, the Adams
faction pictured Jackson, to use the terse summary of a
recent historian, Claude Bowers, ‘“‘as a usurper, an adul-
terer, a gambler, a cock-fighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and
a murderer.” It also turned on his wife, its national cam-
paign committee even sinking so low as to send out bales
of pamphlets attacking the moral character of his ‘‘dear
Rachel” who, although she did smoke a pipe, was a woman
of exemplary life. In this unsavory game, Jackson’s fac-
tion, determined not to be outdone, portrayed Adams as a
stingy Puritan, an aristocrat who hated the people, a cor-
ruptionist who had bought his own election, and a waster
of the people’s money on White House decorations; and
accused Clay of managing Adams’ campaign ‘“‘like a shyster,
pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire.”

When the smoke of the fray had lifted, it was found
that Adams had won nothing but the electoral votes of
New England and not even all those; whereas Jackson
had carried the rest of the Union, making an absolutely
clean sweep in the South and West. ‘The collapse of the
Adams party was terrible to behold. Gentlemen and grand
dames of the old order, like the immigrant nobles and
ladies of France fleeing from the sansculottes of Paris,
could discover no consolation in their grief.

On March 4, 1829, a son of the soil rode into Washing-
ton to take the oath of office. All the Presidents before
Andrew Jackson had come from families that possessed

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 553

property and its cultural accompaniments. None had been
compelled to work with his hands for a livelihood; all ex-
cept Washington had received a college education. Jack-
son, on the other hand, born of poverty-stricken parents
in the uplands of South Carolina, was of the earth earthy.
It is not even known just how or when he got the barest
rudiments of learning but it is certain that to the end of his
life his language, if forceful and direct, was characterized
by grammar strangely and wonderfully constructed.

In his youth Jackson had gone to the Tennessee fron-
tier where, as a land speculator, horse trader, politician,
and rural genius in general, he managed to amass a large
estate and a goodly number of slaves. Tall and sinewy,
he loved wrestling matches, fist fights, and personal quar-
rels. By way of settling one dispute, he killed a man in
a duel and ever afterward treasured the pistol that per-
formed the deed as a trophy to show his visitors. In an
awful brawl with the Benton brothers, he himself received
a bullet which remained imbedded in his flesh for many
years as evidence of his hardihood. Whenever an Indian
fight occurred in his neighborhood, he rushed to the front.

Elevated to the leadership of the local militia by his un-
doubted courage, Jackson won the passionate devotion of
his men by sharing their hardships and perils. Already a
local hero, he had leaped into national fame in 1815
by defeating a blundering and incompetent British general
at the battle of New Orleans. Finally, he had added more
laurels by wresting Florida from Spain, summarily hang-
ing two English subjects, and stamping out warlike Indians
on the border.

This son of the soil, transformed in the eyes of his de-
votees into a military figure comparable to Napoleon the
Great, furnished excellent presidential timber for the new
democracy. ‘That his views on the tariff, internal improve-
ments, and other current issues were nebulous in no way
detracted from his immense and irresistible availability.
He was from the West. He was a farmer—a slave owner,

554 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

no doubt, but still a farmer. He had none of the unction
that marked the politicians of the seaboard school and the
mechanics could think of him as one of themselves.

Jackson’s opponents, of course, sneered because he was
rough in manner, smoked an old pipe, chewed tobacco
profusely, told stories that could not be printed, loafed
around with a week’s bristles on his face, and wore soiled
clothes. John Quincy Adams, who knew Jackson well,
could hardly suppress his anguish when Harvard gave ‘“‘the
brawler from Tennessee” the degree of doctor of laws. It
was not a pure accident that Jackson’s chief regret at the
end of his presidential course was “‘that he had never had
an opportunity to shoot Clay or hang Calhoun.’ But the
contempt of his enemies only endeared him the more to the
masses, especially as all charges were discreetly counterbal-
anced by news that he regularly read the Bible, recited
countless lines of Watts’ doleful hymns, and asked the bless-
ing at the table. Moreover, those who saw him dressed in
his best, with his pipe and plug laid aside, bowing in his
courtliest manner, concluded that the discreditable tales
about him were partisan falsehoods.

When the day of Jackson’s inauguration came, the city
of Washington was jammed with crowds. From near and
far thousands of his devoted followers had come to wit-
ness the spectacle—and in many cases to get jobs in the new
administration. All the decorum of former days was
rudely broken. Bowing right and left to cheering throngs,
Jackson and his party walked from his hotel to the inau-
gural ceremonies. After taking the oath of office, he rode
in his best military style down the Avenue to the White
House, followed by a surging sea of worshippers.

_ On his arrival at the presidential residence the doors were
thrown open to everybody and, if Webster is to be ac-
cepted as authority, the pushing idolators behaved lke
hoodlums, upsetting the punch bowls, breaking glasses, and
standing in muddy boots on damask chairs to catch a glimpse
of the people’s Napoleon. ‘‘The reign of King Mob

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY |. 555

seemed triumphant,” groaned Justice Story of the Supreme
Court. Recalling the refinements of Jefferson, Mrs. Mar-
garet Bayard Smith, a leader in the local social set, held her
nose and wrote: ‘“The noisy and disorderly rabble .. .
brought to my mind descriptions I have read of the mobs
in the Tuileries and at Versailles.”’

With utmost dispatch the business of government—
and dividing the spoils—was begun. To aid him in the
operation, Jackson chose two cabinets. The first, com-
posed of the heads of departments, was filled with men of
fair talent and some distinction; many a worse ministry
has been assembled since. ‘The second, known as the
“Kitchen Cabinet,’’ was made up of Isaac Hill, Amos Ken-
dall, and other private advisers, who served as a collective
agency to keep the king informed about the gossip of the
capital and to keep the masses in good humor with news
meet for their understanding.

As soon as the chiefs were installed, a survey of the gen-
tlemen in federal berths commenced. ‘‘No damn rascal
who made use of an office or its profits for the purpose of
keeping Mr. Adams in or General Jackson out of power
is entitled to the least leniency save that of hanging,” wrote
one of the President’s applicants. ‘“‘You may say to all our
anxious Adamsites that the Barnacles will be scraped clean
off the Ship of State,” declared a member of the kitchen
sanhedrin. ‘Most of them have grown so large and stick
so tight that the scraping process will doubtless be fatal to
them.”

Though the threats were terrifying, in fact the slaughter
of the innocents was not as great as the opposition alleged.
Indeed, many got only their just deserts; some of the
tenants were found to be scoundrels, prosecuted, and con-
victed for fraudulent transactions while public servants, one
of the “martyrs,’’ a personal friend of Adams, being sent
to prison for stealing from the Treasury. No doubt hun-
dreds of old and faithful officers were ousted; but on
the other hand hundreds were allowed to retain their places

556 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

in spite of the severe pressure from the Jackson followers,
begging for jobs.

It is therefore due to the memory of the President to
say that, like Clive in India, he had reason to be proud
of his moderation. ‘To this judgment must be quickly
joined the statement that Jackson started the custom of
making wholesale removals in favor of party workers, giv-
ing high national sanction to the practice of bestowing the
spoils upon the victors. A few intellectuals, such as James
Russell Lowell, soon poured ridicule upon the system; many
statesmen, especially those who had never had occasion to
make use of it, denounced it; yet as time passed that form
of political etiquette became more and more prevalent, hard-
ening into prescription.

In addition to scraping barnacles from the Ship of State,
Jackson gave energetic consideration to the political issues
of the hour: the tariff, nullification, the Bank, internal im-
provements, and the disposal of western lands. All these
questions were economic in character, presenting new
phases of the struggle that had produced the colonial revolt
against Great Britain, the reaction under Hamilton, and the
swing to Jefferson. And their management involved the
fortunes of the three marked sections into which the coun-
try was divided—the capitalistic Northeast, the planting
South, and the farming regions beyond the seaboard—with
the mechanics of the towns coming into the play whenever
the aristocracy of wealth and talents was to be pommeled.

Each section had an outstanding champion who sought
to make congressional combinations of power in the inter-
est of his constituents. Daniel Webster, as Fisher, his
biographer, tells us, was ‘“‘the hope and reliance of the
moneyed and conservative classes, the merchants, manufac-
turers, capitalists, and bankers.” John C. Calhoun acted
frankly as the mouthpiece of the planting aristocracy; he
acknowledged it and was proud of it. ‘Thomas Hart Ben-
ton of Missouri was the shouting spokesman of the western
farmers and land speculators who were struggling to wrench

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY Shi

the public domain from the grip of the government. Hap-
pily placed between extremes, North and South, Henry
Clay labored to construct a platform that would command
the support of the eastern capitalists and the western farm-
ers, unite hearts and make him President; but he failed
to accomplish his design.

Into the lists Jackson entered as gladiator-at-large for
the masses against the moneyed classes, declaring that the
agricultural interest was ‘‘superior in importance’’ to all
others and placing himself, as he said, at the head of ‘‘the
humbler members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and
laborers who have neither the time nor the means” of
securing special favors for themselves. ‘They heard him

gladly and thought him their Sir Galahad.

§

During Jackson’s first administration the oldest of
domestic questions, the tariff, became so acute -that, in
1832, it raised a revolt among the South Carolina planters.
Between the opening of the century and that date signal
changes had been made in the economic condition of the
country. The Embargo and the War of 1812, by cutting
off the stream of English manufactures, produced an im-
mense growth in American industries, a growth that was
further enhanced by the tariff of 1816, enacted, ostensibly
at least, to provide a continuous home market for agricul-
tural produce. In this process the economic climate of
several regions was radically altered.

Although the leaders of New England—the home of
American shipping interests engaged in a lively carrying
trade—had opposed the tariff of 1816, they accepted the
unavoidable and turned their best energies, together with
their capital, to the promotion of manufactures favored by
protection. Iron masters of Connecticut, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania, having reaped high profits under the gracious
shade of the tariff wall, naturally thought of increasing their

558 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

earnings by raising the bulwark. Even the wool, hemp, and
flax growers of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the
sugar planters of Louisiana discovered that, while free
trade was good for agriculturists as a general theory, ad-
vantageous exceptions could be made in practice. Other eco-
nomic interests of various kinds veered in the new direction.

And as the number of protected groups increased and
their capital augmented, the pressure on Congress for addi-
tional safeguards became heavier and heavier. - Then po-
litical weathervanes veered. Webster, who had fought the
tariff of 1816, taking note of drifting flaw, became an
ardent champion of protection. If Calhoun, finding the
sea lanes to industrial England open once more, turned
back upon his course to free trade, his colleague, Clay,
developed the idea of “discriminating”? customs duties into
a perfect’ national system. 2’ Dame’ ‘Commerce, "he ex.
claimed, ‘“‘is a flirting, flippant, noisy Jade and if we are
governed by her fantasies, we shall never put off the mus-
lins of India and the cloths of Europe.’ So he appealed
to “the yeomanry of the country, the true and genuine land-
lords of this tenement, called the United States,’ to eman-
cipate the nation from dependence on foreign capitalists.

Under the drive of combined economic powers, the tariff
was forced up in 1824, again in 1828, and higher still in
1832. The second of these three revisions, known as the
“tariff of abominations’ among its enemies, was carried
through Congress by such a determined union of factions
that the planting statesmen who now wanted to trade their
produce freely for the manufactures of England were
thrown into an unwonted political fear. Badly defeated
in the forum at Washington, they began to build a back-
fire at home. Speaking through the legislatures of Vir-
ginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Ala-
bama, they solemnly denounced the tariff of abominations.

Then, finding such denunciations to be mere rhetoric
flung against triumphant fact, South Carolina, weary of
sheer verbalism, made ready for open resistance. In the

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 559

autumn of 1832, the state legislature ordered an election
of delegates to a convention, with a view of preparing for
the worst. The elections were duly held, the assembly
was convened, and an Ordinance of Nullification tossed
defiantly in the face of the protected interests. This Ordi-
nance named the battleground and the weapons. It de-
_clared that the tariff gave ‘“‘bounties to classes and indi-
viduals . . . at the expense and to the injury and oppres-
sion of other classes and individuals.’’ Running true to
American political phraseology, it proclaimed the tariff a
violation of the Constitution—therefore null and void and
without force in the state of South Carolina. It closed
with a solemn warning that, if the federal government at-
tempted to coerce the people of the state, they would assert
their independence and take their place as a sovereign power
among the nations of the earth. }

While the issue thus joined was fraught with peril to the
republic, it was not absolutely intractable. No doubt,
South Carolina’s challenge of nullification coupled with se-
cession, like the gesture of New England during the War
of 1812, was defiant, but the planting forces were not yet
welded into an unyielding cohesion. On the contrary, the
cotton states to which South Carolina appealed for support
—as she did again in 1860—after condemning the tariff as
abominable, refused point blank to approve nullification as
a remedy. On the other side, the protected interests, as-
sailed in the rear by Jacksonian farmers, were not strong
enough to hold in an open affray sectors they had taken
by congressional negotiation nor yet prepared to attempt
a suppression of nullification by arms. Capitalism and
cotton had many leagues to cover before they could be
joined in a death grapple. Evidently an accommodation
was both necessary and possible.

To the settlement, President Jackson contributed some-
thing, though what and how much it is hard to say. Beyond
question his devotion to the Union was deep and sincere.
Although he came from a region that had once been ready

560 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

to “‘fly off” when the closure of the Mississippi was threat-
ened, his state was now well content with the common roof
the Fathers had built. While there were slave owners in
Tennessee, and Jackson was one of them, the political com-
munity, largely dominated by small farmers, was by no
means assimilated completely to the planting system. Cot-
ton was not king there and Jackson’s sympathies, as he was
wont to say, were with the humble people, rather than with
the planters or with capitalists. Moreover, he had a
tiger’s hatred for Calhoun, apostle of nullification—a per-
sonal hatred which grew out of a well-authenticated report
that the South Carolina statesman, when a member of
Monroe’s Cabinet, had proposed the arrest of Jackson for
his cavalier conduct during the Seminole War in Florida.
Smarting with resentment, the General, at a Jefferson din-
ner in 1830, had snapped out his warning to Calhoun in a
toast: ‘Our Federal Union—lIt must and shall be pre-
served.” Besides this, Jackson was President of the United
States and he regarded resistance to authority in the light
of a personal insult as well as a violation of law.

When he heard the news of South Carolina’s action,
Jackson therefore declared himself ready to “hang every
leader . ... of that infatuated people, sir, by martial law,
irrespective of his name or political or social position.”
Regarding nullification at bottom as a species of sedition,
he vowed that he would meet it ‘‘at the threshold and have
the leaders arrested and arraigned for treason.” Still he
was careful to confine such heated expressions to private
letters and conversations. With a strong feeling for reali-
ties, he sent a shrewd politician to South Carolina to sound
the earth at the very moment that he was preparing to order
out additional troops.

In his public utterances Jackson spoke more softly, using
the phrases of law and order rather than the language of
the battlefield. ‘Taking refuge in a long and eloquent
proclamation, the President announced his firm belief in
the sacredness and perpetuity of the Union and his inten-

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 561

tion to uphold it by the exercise of all the powers vested
in him by the Constitution. This document was put in
final form, it seems, by his Secretary of State, Edward
Livingston, one of the most remarkable figures in Ameri-
can history; but the central idea of the paper was Jackson’s
own. Though emphatic, it contained no bluster, no
threats of executions, no menace of martial law. It was
firm, yet conciliatory toward the South Carolinians, appeal-
ing, as did Lincoln’s inaugural address long afterward, to
their love of Union rather than their fear of force. Em-
ploying also the tactics of moderation in his messages to
Congress on the crisis, Jackson proposed that the tariff
against which the nullifiers protested be lowered—that was
just what they wanted—and called for new legislation grant-
ing the President larger powers in the enforcement of the
laws—which they did not mind much if the laws pleased
them.

Here was a case for compromise and Henry Clay, past
master of that fine art, rose to the occasion, laying before
the Senate in February, 1833, a plan which offered consola-
tions to both parties. ‘Turning courteously to the planters,
he proposed that the tariff to which they objected be
reduced to the level fixed in 1816, which Calhoun him-
self had then approved. Bowing tactfully to the other
side, he suggested that nothing drastic be done immedi-
ately, that the proposed reduction should extend over a
period of ten years, taking the form of curtailment by
easy stages. Remembering the affection which all men pro-
fessed for the Union, he also accepted a bill making provi-
sion for upholding its supremacy by armed force, if neces-
sary. After a warm debate, both propositions—the one
lowering the tariff and the other exalting the Union—passed
both houses of Congress and were signed by the President
on the same day, March 2.

Hailing the outcome as a glorious victory, South Caro-
lina rescinded the Ordinance nullifying the tariff and satis-
fied her honor by declaring the force bill null and void.

$62 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Everywhere planters regarded the triumph of open resist-
ance as complete. According to all outward signs, at least,
they had every reason to rejoice, for whatever might be
said about the flowers of speech that decorated the con-
test, they had actually checked the progress of the Hamil-
ton-Webster system—checked it so thoroughly that a few
years later, when the manufacturing interests succeeded in
pushing the tariff up again, they were able to bring it down
by easier means.

On the other hand, Jackson could point with pride to the
fact that the Union had been duly preserved, and the pro-
tected industries could take pleasure in escaping a single
swift blow of repudiation. It was not until his last days
that Clay, on reviewing his career of strife and disappoint-
ment, found in his mind grave doubts about the wisdom of
his course. Would it have been better if he had let Jackson
and the nullifiers come to blows in 1833, settling then and
there, by force of arms, the mighty economic question that
divided the sections? Who, working under the eye of
eternity, could make answer ?

§

Interwoven with the tariff controversy was the public
land question which had worried George III’s ministers,
plagued Hamilton, and continued to evoke heated dispute.
Besides inspiring Senator Benton of Missouri to flights of
eloquence, it called forth the celebrated Webster-Hayne
debate in 1830, the greatest among the many verbal battles
of the Jacksonian era. Although constitutional glosses
have almost buried the substance of that disputation, its
kernel was essentially economic. It arose over a proposal
of a Connecticut Senator, Samuel A. Foote, to inquire into
the expediency of limiting the sale of the public lands—a
matter of moment both to protected manufacturers and
slave-owning planters. The former, as eager to secure an
abundance of cheap labor as to find shelter behind a tariff

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 563

barrier, viewed with grave concern the westward rush to
land in the public domain. Working people who forsook
flaming forges and whirling spindles to till the soil in the
Ohio Valley were lost to the mills; while those who re-
mained behind could raise their wages by threatening to
follow in the footsteps of the pioneers. On the other hand,
southern planters, not yet aware that a valley of free farm-
ers might in time contest their own sway, saw a possible
addition to their strength in the growing agricultural popu-
lation beyond the Alleghenies. Farmers and planters act-
ing together, the latter reasoned, might overcome the manu-
facturing capitalists in politics at Washington.

There was nothing occult in this philosophy. Every
statesman of the time knew the relation of the land ques-
tion to the tariff issue and to the balance of power in the
American Union, none better than Webster of Massachu-
setts and Hayne of South Carolina. In fact, Hayne in
throwing down the gage was merely supporting a fiery
Jacksonian Democrat, Senator Benton, who frankly spoke
for the western farmers and kept his heart fixed on their
concerns. Webster, taking up the gage, simply made a
clever stroke by choosing the champion of slavery rather
than the Gracchus of Missouri as the object of his attack.
If he had opposed Benton, instead of the South Carolina
lawyer, his plea for the Union might have been heard with
less pleasure beyond the mountains and the formation of
the Republican homestead-tariff bloc at Chicago in 1860
might have been still more difficult.

That problems in accountancy lay solidly beneath the
cloud of constitutional argument was made manifest in the
course of the debate, especially by the orator from South
Carolina. Referring to the War of 1812, Hayne ad-
vanced passionately upon Webster, lashing out: “At this
dark period of our National affairs, where was the Senator
from Massachusetts? How were his political associates
employed? ‘Calculating the value of the union.’”? More
than that, he exclaimed, when the nation, in a perilous

564 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

moment, was fighting for its life against a powerful foe,
New England had resisted the enforcement of the law and
prepared for a division of the country—all because her
commercial interests were impaired.

With generality Hayne included some particulars.
‘Nothing was left undone,” he said, “to embarrass the
financial operations of the government, to prevent the en-
listment of troops, to keep back the men and money of New
England from the service of the Union, to force the Presi-
dent from his seat. . . . With what justice or propriety can
the South be accused of disloyalty from that quarter?” In
the heat of the fray, Hayne possibly overlooked the fact
that his sword cut both ways. If South Carolina was right
in 1830, why was New England wrong in 1814? If Massa-
chusetts was disloyal in Madison’s administration, what
could be said of South Carolina in Jackson’s administra-
tion? Legally, nothing; ethically, perhaps, nullification was
less defensible in war than in peace. The core of the matter
lay in the reversed economic situation; but perhaps beyond
economics lay something transcendent—national destiny.

In an oration which has by general consent taken its place
among the masterpieces of all time, Webster made the most
of the opportunity presented by Hayne. He had been
taunted with inconsistency; he answered in kind by showing.
the reversal of South Carolina’s opinion on the tariff after
1816. New England had been charged with disloyalty to
the Union; Webster faced the issue squarely by saying that,
if anything savoring of treason was to be found in the rec-
ords of New England, he offered not defense but rebuke.
To Hayne’s itemized bill of indictment against Massachu-
setts, Webster replied by throwing a blaze of glorious
encomium on the record of the state in the Revolution and
by adroitly covering the more recent pages of history with
the mantle of evasion and oblivion.

The philosophy of nullification had been defended by
Hayne; Webster, who had been perilously near it himself
but a short time before, now marched upon it with sonorous

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 565

rhetoric. Using historical allusions, many of them clouded
by doubtful authenticity, employing logical inferences often
more adroit than conclusive, he underwrote the doctrine
of perpetual union—a union made by the people, not by
the states, an object of love and admiration forever. In
his peroration, Webster, the artist and prophetic man of
letters, broke through the entanglements of the politician;
in an almost superhuman effort he shot the white light of
his poetic vision down the shadowed avenue of the future
to dark and bloody places where men inspired by his ideal
and reciting his moving periods were to die for the cause he
had so magnificently celebrated.

In piling Ossa on Pelion, Webster did not overlook mun-
dane considerations—the economic and political substance
of the pending issue, the sale of those annoying western
lands. New England had been accused of enmity toward
the West, of cherishing a hard and selfish policy; he an-
swered by showing how New England had favored those
internal improvements so dear to the West—roads that
opened markets to produce and raised the values of land.
Then he turned upon Hayne and warned him that the
southern statesmen who, like the enemies of Banquo, had
killed friendship between the farming and the commercial
states would gain nothing in the end because they could
never drag the West with them to nullification and seces-
sion, another flare of prophecy that was fulfilled in 186r.
But Webster was more than an orator. He was a practical
man; when he came from the sky to earth, he moved to post-
pone indefinitely the resolution of Senator Foote which of-
fended the West, burying it under the mountain of papers
on the table.

The South Carolinian thus won a futile victory; and in
the process New England also lost. If eastern members
of Congress had in fact approved Benton’s long-pending
bill for giving away the public lands to farmers, if they had
then and there effected a union with the West by yielding
on the land question, as they were finally forced to do in

566 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

1860, they might have spared themselves a thirty years’
struggle with the low tariff party.. More than that, they
would have made the forces of the Union a combination
of power so formidable that secession would have scarcely
dared to face it. But they failed to seize this grand occa-
sion for the not unnatural reason that politicians must ap-
parently work in the fear that rises from the instant need of
things.
§

If the tariff and land questions had stood alone, the
Northeast and the West might have found it easier to
draw together in 1830, but the old banking and currency
issue that had plagued America since the days of George
III was once more to the front in a virulent form. The
second United States Bank, chartered for twenty years in
1816 to enable the Jeffersonians to finance their war, was
becoming in the minds of western farmers and eastern me-
chanics the very citadel of tyrannical money power.

Radical Democrats had denounced it on principle from
the beginning and their attacks steadily increased in ani-
mosity. Others acquired their views from practice. The
notes of the Bank, sound throughout the Union, drove
from circulation the paper currency of shaky institutions
chartered by state politicians, thus inflaming village states-
men with anger against the “rich and well-born.”’ Its man-
agers were accused of showing favoritism to friendly poli-
ticians and of discriminating against the followers of
Jackson in making loans; indeed a ‘“‘psychic injury” of this
character, alleged to have been inflicted on one of the
President’s friends, seems to have been the original source
of his special rage against the Bank. ‘he managers were
likewise charged with using their power to contract the
currency for the purpose of punishing their enemies, with
giving retainers to some of their orators in Congress,
and with spending corporate funds for campaign purposes.
So the natural hostility of the masses to the plutocracy was

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 567

intensified by dark and sinister rumors about a new “‘cor-
rupt squadron.”

That many of the charges against the Bank were ground-
less was later revealed by historical research. If some of
Jackson’s men were denied loans for business reasons, it
was never proved that discriminations were made against
Democratic politicians merely on account of their doctrinal
views. If the Bank refused to be used by the brokers in
spoils, its motive was economic rather than partisan. In
the beginning at least, its president, Nicholas Biddle, it
seems, tried to steer his way “on sound business lines”’
through the maze of politics.

After the war on the Bank commenced, however, both he
and his colleagues laid hold of the various weapons at hand.
From that time forward, the allegation that members of
Congress received retainers from the Bank certainly rested
on a substantial basis. In any case its mightiest spokesman
in the Senate, Daniel Webster, was on the payroll of the
corporation, a fact made clear in distant days by the pub-
lication of Biddle’s letters and papers. In those docu-
ments it is recorded that, two weeks after the opening of a
congressional session in which a battle royal was to be
fought over its charter, Webster wrote to Biddle, shrewdly
conveying the information that he had declined to take a
case against the Bank and adding with charming frankness:
‘I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed
as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank
should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual
retainers.”

Equally well established now is the charge that the Bank
contracted its loans for the purpose of producing distress
and breaking the back of the political opposition. Beyond
all question, in the midst of the contest a term of financial
stringency was deliberately inflicted on the country; Biddle,
sure of his ground, declaring to the head of the Boston
branch that ‘nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad
will produce any effect in Congress.’’ Webster himself,

568 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

convinced that pressure on the populace would be useful,
wrote to Biddle that “‘this discipline, it appears to me, must
have very great effects on the general question of recharter-
ing the Bank.”

In fact, the private correspondence of the period now
open to the student shows that the supporters and benefi-
ciaries of the Bank had effected a strong union of forces for
the purpose of controlling a large section of the press, dic-
tating to politicians, frightening indifferent business men,
and defying Jackson and his masses. ‘This worthy Presi-
dent,” laughed Biddle, “thinks that because he has scalped
Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with
the Bank. He is mistaken.”

Pride was, nevertheless, riding for a fall. Jackson’s
anger, once aroused, was terrible to behold; it was the anger
of the warrior rushing on his foe heedless of wounds and
death, not the cold and calculating wrath of the counting
house. Moreover, he had behind him the accumulating
discontent of the agrarian and labor elements in the new
democracy—an unrest which he steadily fanned into flame
by very clever tactics. In his first message to Congress,
Jackson attacked the Bank openly but not with might and
main. In his second and third messages, he deftly referred
to the subject, warily leaving the decision to “‘an enlightened
people and their representatives.”

If the opposition had maintained a discreet silence, a
clash might have been avoided; but, boasting of its wisdom,
it chose another course. [he Bank was uneasy about the
future; and Clay, sniffing the presidential air in 1832, de-
cided to make an issue of it then and there. Though its
charter had four more years to run, the Bank applied for
a renewal and Congress, under the leadership of Clay,
passed the bill granting the petition.

Jackson’s reply to this defiance was a veto and a ringing
message calling on the masses to support his position. Pay-
ing his respects to high sentiments, he took his stand by
the Ark of the Covenant, declaring the Bank unconstitu-

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 569

tional. Knowing full well that the Supreme Court had
held otherwise a few years before, Jackson countered this
uncomfortable verdict with the bald statement that each
officer took the oath to support the Constitution as he
understood it, not as it was understood by others—a doc-
trine that probably set all aged gentlemen in horsehair and
robes trembling for the future of their country, while pleas-
ing Old Hickory’s followers immensely.

Having paid his homage to the auspices, Jackson got
down to the meat of the matter: the alignment of economic
forces. He called attention to the fact that the people of
the western and southwestern states held only $140,000
worth of the twenty-eight millions of capital stock out-
standing in private hands, whereas the capitalists of the
middle and eastern states held more than thirteen millions.
He pointed out that, of the annual profits of the Bank,
$1,640,000 came from nine western states where little or
none of the stock was held.

The moral lesson was obvious. It was an economic con-
flict that happened to take a sectional form: the people
of the agricultural West had to pay tribute to eastern and
foreign capitalists on the money they had borrowed to
buy land, make improvements, and engage in speculation.
Jackson did not shrink from naming the contestants. ‘The
rich and powerful” were bending the acts of the government
to their selfish purposes; the rich were growing richer under
special privilege; “many of our rich men... have be-
sought us to make them richer by acts of Congress. By
attempting to gratify their desires, we have in the results
of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest
against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commo-
tion which threatens to shake the foundations of our
Union.”

That was indeed a call to arms. The head of the Bank,
Biddle, declared himself delighted with it. ‘“‘It has all the
fury of the unchained panther, biting the bars of his cage.
It is really a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat and

570 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Robespierre might have issued to the mob.” The Presi-
dent’s cheer leaders threw up their hats with sheer joy at the
spectacle. Western farmers had been charged with seeking
to avoid their honest debts; they had replied by asserting
that the money they borrowed had been made by the print-
ing presses of the Bank under government authority. Now
Jackson embodied their theories and vehemence in a
message. If there was any frosty philosopher present,
looking serenely upon the battle, he has left us no memoirs.
In the election of 1832, after a campaign of unrestrained
emotions, Jackson completely discomfited his opponent,
Clay, and returned to the White House like a Roman con-
queror with his victims at his chariot. The Bank had
fought him; thinking in terms of war, the President pro-
ceeded to fight back. Its charter had four years of legal
life remaining; the law could not be repealed by military
decree; so other means of attack were found. Acting as
head of the administration, Jackson ordered the Secretary
of the Treasury to deposit no more federal revenues in the
Bank or any of its branches and to withdraw in the payment
of bills the government’s cash already in its vaults. Be-
sides this he distributed the national funds among state
banks, remembering to reward those which had correct
political affliations—institutions which became known as
“pet banks.” As the treasury surplus happened to be
mounting, Congress, now in Democratic hands, got rid of it
by spreading the money among the state governments,
nominally in the form of loans, practically in the shape of
gifts. erin
In 1836 the second United States Bank automatically
came to the end of its checkered career and the country
under the inspiration of the new democracy entered an
epoch of “‘wild cat” finance. ‘The very next year, a terrible
business depression fell like a blight upon the land, bring-
ing as usual more suffering to farmers and mechanics than
to the “rich and well-born’’; but this calamity was likewise
attributed by the masses to the machinations of the money

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY Vo Svat

power rather than to the conduct of their hero, President
Jackson. Nothing would induce them to retrace their steps.
For three decades a union of the South and West prevented
a restoration of the centralized banking system. Not until
the planting statesmen withdrew from Congress and the
storm of the Civil War swept minor gusts before it
were the ravages wrought by Jackson repaired by the di-
rectors of affairs in Washington.

§

The economic policies and personal conduct of Jackson
split wide the Republican party of Jefferson and put a sud-
den term to the era of good feeling. No President had
ever exercised such high perogatives as Jackson or shown
so little consideration for the feelings of those who came
under executive displeasure. Besides keeping the entire
body of minor civil servants in constant terror of repri-
mand and dismissal, he treated his own Cabinet with scant
courtesy, while deciding vital questions himself or with the
advice of his backstairs coterie. When one Secretary of the
Treasury refused to remove the deposits from the Bank on
executive order, Jackson summarily appointed another;
when the second also declined to be a mere tool, he chose
a third, who finally did his bidding with the alacrity of an
errand boy. Angered by a protest lodged by the Senate
against his arbitrary conduct, Jackson made his followers
force through a measure expunging the hated resolution,
one of the lieutenants in flushed exultation blotting the
censure from the records. Unawed by the majesty of the
Supreme Court, Jackson treated the decisions of Chief Jus-
tice Marshall with little respect; and when death eventually
removed that distinguished judge from the bench, the Presi-
dent put in Marshall’s place Roger B. Taney, an able and
astute politician who was known to favor state banking.

In faithful accord with the law of antithesis, the person-
ality and measures of Jackson summoned into being an

572 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

angry, if motley, opposition. His assault on the Bank
aroused the undying hatred of high finance. His approval
of a tariff that meant ultimately a material reduction in
the protective features set most of the manufacturers
fiercely against him. His efforts to stir up ‘“‘the humble
members of society—farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” to
repeat his phrase—against the ‘‘rich and powerful” had
worried thousands of prosperous people in the South, espe-
cially cautious planters who thought they had as much to
fear from the leveling passions of small farmers in the back
country as from the tariffs of New England mill owners.
In South Carolina they had an additional reason for oppos-
ing Jackson for he had talked in a high and mighty fashion
of suppressing “‘insurrection”’ and hanging “traitors.”

Here then were the elements for a powerful political
combination if some process of welding could be discovered.
Doubtless Jackson’s enemies owned the major portion of the
working capital of the country. Certainly they com-
manded oratory and ingenuity; but, as yet united merely by
common antipathy to the President and his party—by
the timidity of property in the presence of unfathomable
dangers—they presented no solid array for a political con-
test. Only statecraft of the highest order could amal-
gamate nullifiers and nationalists, protectionists and free
traders, planters and manufacturers into a working asso-
ciation. Only skill in appealing to popular imagination
could convince the mass of voters that the great hope could
be realized at last.

Nevertheless the task was worth while for many reasons
and Henry Clay of Kentucky seemed fated for leadership
in the undertaking. All things considered, Clay had sev-
eral kinds of availability: he was from the West and so
could invade Jackson’s home province; he was favorably
known among the manufacturers and financiers of the East
but, unlike Webster, was not charged with being the pet and
pensioner of capitalists. Though a facile speaker, he had
not hopelessly committed himself in his school days to the

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 573

ponderous periods of Cicero; while he could at times soar
to the empyrean, he was always able to talk to the public
in the vernacular.

Taking the title abandoned by Jackson, opponents of
that popular hero called themselves “National Republi-
cans” and later ‘‘Whigs,” for short, after the manner of
the English adversaries of royal prerogative. In 1832,
with Clay at their head, they tried to oust the President by
employing all the approved methods of politics, including
propaganda and social terrorism.

In an imposing phalanx, they marshaled most of the
middle classes—friends of the national bank, advocates of
sound money, lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, business-
men of the higher ranges, and college professors. Man-
agers of the Bank subsidized the press by large payments
for advertising. Mill owners threatened workmen with
dismissal in case Jackson was elected. A packer in Cin-
cinnnati told the farmers that he would pay $2.50 a hun-
dred for pork if Clay was victorious and a dollar less if
his opponent, the Democratic President, was returned to
power in Washington.

And purists attacked Jackson in their especial field.
Since his system of theology was about as nebulous as his
politics, they charged him with irreligion. They accused
him of beginning a long journey from the Hermitage on a
Sabbath and he only escaped the serious censure of the
virtuous by showing that he really started on Monday.
When he declined to proclaim a day of prayer for relief
from the cholera, suggesting instead that under the Con-
stitution it was a matter for the states to decide, Clay
pounced upon him for his impiety and moved a resolution
in the Senate to name the day for the appeal to God. Dur-
ing the campaign the voters were not allowed to forget that
impiety and unsound finance went hand in hand. And still
all the legions and all the artillery could not defeat the
hero of New Orleans.

§

574 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

After ruling the country with an iron hand for eight
years, supported by the acclaim of the masses, Jackson
naturally regarded the choice of his successor as a part of
his sovereign prerogative. Indeed at the opening of his first
administration, he had made it known discreetly that he
wanted his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of, New
York, to take his place when he left the White House.
Obedient to his lightest wish, his kitchen companions bent
their efforts to the task of securing the throne for the
“crown prince” and their labors were successful.

In a well-selected convention, “fresh from the people,”
they nominated Van Buren as the party candidate for the
presidential election of 1836. By this time the Jacksonians
had discarded the safe old title of Republican, chosen by
Jefferson, and had taken instead the flaunting label, ‘‘Demo-
crat’’—a word that once had grated as harshly on urbane
ears as its constant companion, ‘‘anarchist.”’ Subject to the
law of familiarity, the insignia that had frightened grand
gentlemen and fine ladies of the heroic days had become a
household emblem; men who shrank from it with horror two
decades before now wore it proudly on their shields. |

Though they had in Van Buren a less formidable candi-
date to face, the Whigs, failing to unite on a single leader,
went down to defeat. But just when everything seemed
hopeless, the tide turned. The victorious President fell into
a series of misfortunes that gave heart to his enemies. On
the threshold of his administration, he encountered a dis-
astrous business panic, the wild tumult of speculation and
inflation ending in an explosion. While Jackson’s war on
high finance had doubtless hastened the inexorable, it was
not the sole cause of the crash.

The fact was that one of the periodic cycles of capitalism
was at hand and the party in power at Washington could
offer no effective remedies, if any there were. On the con-
trary, it accelerated the ruinous process by repealing the
law which provided for the distribution of surplus federal
revenues among the state treasuries and by issuing the specie

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY |. 575

circular which directed federal officers to accept only gold
and silver, save in certain cases, in payment for public lands.
Having taken these precautions in the interest of its credit,
the government simply allowed the winds to blow. Hun-
dreds of banks failed; mills were shut down; work on canals
and railways was stopped; thousands of laboring people
were turned into the streets; federal revenues fell until a
deficit supplanted a surplus; land sales dropped off; and
speculation came to a standstill.

Throughout this panic President Van Buren maintained
a kind of academic composure. As the leader of Jackson-
ian Democracy, he could do nothing that would please busi-
ness men and financiers anyway; and his party had no con-
structive plan of its own. He, therefore, contented him-
self with urging the establishment of an independent treas-
ury to receive and guard the funds of the federal govern-
ment—a simple project of doubtful merit which Congress,
after three years of discussion, finally adopted in 1840.

§

At that moment another presidential campaign was at
hand. Whigs were making ready to restore Hamilton’s sys-
tem of economy; and Democrats to destroy the last vestiges
of the “money power.’ Astute Whig leaders, counting
heads, saw that they would have to be clever if they were
to overcome the multitudinous Jacksonian host made up
of farmers and mechanics with some of the planters in the
vanguard. Accordingly they exercised the wisdom of ser-
pents. They cast aside Clay, whose views on the Bank,
tariff, and other economic questions were too well known
and beat the Democrats at their own game, by themselves
nominating a western farmer and military hero, General
William Henry Harrison.

This man of Mars was, of course, no Napoleon com-
parable to the great Jackson of New Orleans, but he had
beaten some Indians at the battle of Tippecanoe and had

$576 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

served with honor in the War of 1812. More than that,
at the close of his military career, he had pleased western
agrarians by settling down in a modest home in Ohio.
To make his appeal perfect in the eyes of Whig managers,
Harrison’s political opinions were so hazy that no one
could be alienated by them.

It was with an eye to such qualifications for the presi-
dency that the shrewd Biddle, tutored by his experience with
Jackson, gave sound direction to party managers in this
style: ‘If Genl. Harrison is taken up as a candidate, it will
be on account of the past. . . . Let him say not one single
word about his principles, or his creed—let him say noth-
ing—promise nothing. Let no Committee, no convention
—no town meeting ever extract from him a single word
about what he thinks now or will do hereafter. Let the
use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden.”

Conjuring with this spirit, the Whigs of 1840 refused to
frame any platform of principles, and simply offered Gen-
eral Harrison to the country as a man of the people while
they attacked Van Buren as an eastern aristocrat. In this
fashion the tables were reversed: the old party of Tiberius
Gracchus was trying to elect a patrician from New York,
whereas the party of the rich and well-born was trying to
elevate a Cincinnatus straight from the furrow.

Given these factors, the campaign of 1840 was naturally
exuberant. Sobered by the possession of power and led
by a man who loved good wine and old silver, symbols
of aristocracy, Democrats softened their former raucous
campaign cries. But the Whigs, made desperate by two de-
feats, took up the discarded tactics of their opponents.
As a party they adopted no policies, avowed no doctrines.
Carlyle’s ‘‘magnificent”” Webster assumed the fustian of the
demagogue, announcing that he was ready to engage in a
fist-fight with anyone who dubbed him an aristocrat, ex-
pressing deep regret that he too had not been born in a
log cabin, and rejoicing that his older brothers and sisters
had begun their lives in such a humble abode. “If I am

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 577

ever ashamed of it,’” he boasted, “‘may my name and the
name of my posterity be blotted from the memory of man-
kind!” That fastidious New York lawyer, William H.
Seward, rode ostentatiously about in an old green farm
wagon making speeches at crossroads villages on the super-
lative merits of the hero of Tippecanoe. The rank and file
erected in every town of importance log cabins from which
hard cider was served in copious draughts to stimulate the
enthusiasm of the voters.

Before gaping crowds, Whig orators berated Van Buren
as a man addicted to high living and lordly manners, alleg-
ing that he even put cologne on his whiskers and was liable
to die of the gout before the end of his term, if elected.
They accused him of eating from gold plate and declared
that he “laced up in corsets such as women in town wear
and if possible tighter than the best of them.”’

Having summarily disposed of Van Buren, the showmen
then presented to the enfranchised their own candidate,
General Harrison, as a noble old Roman of the West who
lived in a hut, worked with his own hands in field and barn,
and left his latchstring out hospitably for the wayfaring
man. ‘‘We’ve tried your purse-proud lords who love in
palaces to shine,” they sang. ‘ But we'll have a ploughman
President of the Cincinnatus line.”’

Probably this buffoonery was distasteful to the staid and
respectable Whigs of the East. In any event, since it was
not as unpalatable as a low tariff and an unsound currency,
they swallowed the medicine of the campaign in the hope of
better times after the election. What else could they do?
Whatever their pains, the returns from the polls afforded
them abundant consolation. Harrison won 234 electoral
votes while Van Buren limped in with sixty.

§

After carrying the country in a dust storm, the Whig
leaders soon revealed their inmost desires. If Harrison

$78 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

had not died shortly after his inauguration leaving his high
office to the Vice President, John Tyler, they might have
gone far on the way toward a restoration of the Hamilton
system. At any rate, with the aid of protectionist Demo-
crats speaking for special constituencies, they were able to
push through the tariff act of 1842 raising the customs
duties and destroying the compromise measure enacted nine
years. before. And, had no factional disputes intervened,
they might have established a third United States Bank
then and there.

Unfortunately for all designs veering in that direction,
their two high captains, Tyler in the White House and Clay
in the Senate, were looking beyond immediate results to
their own possibilities in the coming election. ‘The Presi-
dent, a Virginia man originally taken up by the Whigs to
catch southern votes, knew very well how unpalatable were
Hamilton’s doctrines below the Potomac and he would only
approve a national bank of restricted powers. On the other
hand, Clay, long associated with financial interests in a prac-
tical way, deluded himself into believing that the country
was ready for something more thorough. Neither one of
the contestants, therefore, did his best to bring about an
accommodation; a fight seemed better to them than a truce.
So Tyler vetoed two bank bills in succession and Clay, turn-
ing back to the tactics of 1832, proposed to submit the issue
to the voters at the polls.

As in the first instance, the solemn referendum of 1844
ended in the discomfiture of those who proposed it. Once
more the shout of the Democratic masses rose to heaven
against ‘“‘the money power.” Its machinations, they alleged,
were more tyrannical than ever, citing for proof the increase
in tariff duties and the effort to revive the hated Bank. In
addition they drew attention to an attempt made in Con-
gress in 1843 to force upon the federal government the
assumption of bonds repudiated by a number of states in
the late general panic. Though this scheme was not suc-
cessful, as everybody knew, it furnished to the rural mind

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 579

conclusive evidence that eastern capitalists and English
creditors were trying to make the whole nation pay debts
which it had not contracted.

Furthermore, the Whigs were compelled to bear the brunt
of a damaging attack on the score that their English sympa-
thies were as strong as those of the Federalists half a cen-
tury earlier. In 1842 Webster, as Secretary of State, they
were reminded, had negotiated with Lord Ashburton, rep-
resenting England, an agreement relative to the long-
disputed boundary of Maine in which he surrendered to
Great Britain a large section of land that, under the treaty
of 1783 closing the war for independence, appeared to
belong to the United States. In spite of the fact that this
concession seemed to be the only alternative to war or
continual quarreling, the American public was not at all
happy with the outcome and Webster felt it necessary. to
sweeten the pill by spending some money out of the secret
service funds of his department to carry on a favorable
propaganda through the religious press of Maine. Though
the treaty was eventually ratified, it was roundly con-
demned by discontented Democrats, and especially by the
doughty old warrior, Benton, who called it “a shame and
an injury’—‘‘a solemn bamboozlement.’’ When the use
of public money in creating opinion for the support of the
treaty became known through a congressional investigation,
the wrath of the Democrats burst all bounds.

An accumulation of forces was certainly menacing the
Whigs when the campaign of 1844 approached. Yet, deter-
mined to face the economic issues more firmly than in the
previous contest, they nominated Clay—a threat which the
Democrats answered by choosing as their candidate a friend
and neighbor of Jackson, James K. Polk of Tennessee. In
the referendum so clearly put the verdict of the voters was
emphatic. The party of the Bank, sound money, and high
protection was thoroughly routed, in a sweep as decisive
as that of 1800 which ousted the Federalists from the na-
tional capital. Spokesmen of the planting aristocracy, now

580 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

alarmed by slavery agitation and deeply concerned over the
fate of Texas, were beginning to comprehend that they had
more to hope from leadership in a democracy of farmers,
mechanics, and laborers in general, than from co6peration
with the elements that composed the Whig party in the
North.

On the other hand, the Whigs themselves were made
dimly aware that the balance of power was shifting into
western hands; but it took more defeats to convince them
that they could not destroy their foes with Hamilton’s
weapons alone. Not until 1860 were they able to make an
effective union with the western farmers under the tradi-
tional name of Republican—the name which Jefferson had
chosen in the early days of his party’s history and Clay had
approved when in 1832 he had christened the Federalist
faction anew.

f ey San, Bee
lant Muay s2Gcetaw ees

CHAPTER XIII
Westward to the Pacific

EFORE the western outposts of Jacksonian Democracy,
B Louisiana and Missouri, had settled down comfort-
ably in the Union a movement was in full swing to
carry the Stars and Stripes through the neighboring terri-
tory of Mexico to the Pacific. Nothing could check its
momentum; neither the protests of New England abolition-
ists nor the resistance of the Mexicans; neither the torrid
heat of the desert nor the ice-bound passes of the mountains.
Within a generation it came to a climax in the annexation of
Texas, a war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and
the adjustment of the Oregon boundary. In the eyes of
abolitionists, the drive on Mexico was a slave-owners’ plot,
a conspiracy against a friendly country, the seizure of ‘‘more
pens to cram slaves in.”

Many incidents lent color to this thesis but the tough web
of facts could not be stretched to cover it. There were
other economic forces equally potent: the passion of farm-
ers for more land, the lure of continental trade, and the
profits of New England traffic in the Pacific Ocean. Besides

581 :

582 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

all that there was an active body of unknown citizens who
held several million dollars worth of the debt and land scrip
of Texas and looked to the United States for security—a
sum which exceeded in value all the slaves in the Lone Star
State in 1845. |

Neither slavery nor profit explains, however, the whole
westward movement. There was Manifest Destiny which
covered a multitude of things and was tinged with mystery
by the imagination of the esoteric. According to the version
of the seers a virile people turned their resolute faces
toward the setting sun. Some of them acquired by fair nego-
tiation lawful possessions in Texas; others pierced the desert
and crossed the mountains to gather peltries and engage in
honest trade. ‘Their rights were scorned and their flag was
insulted by incompetent and dishonest Mexican officials.
Innocent persons were imprisoned and some were murdered
by barbarians. In such circumstances silence was dishonor-
able, peace a folly, annexation a virtue. Such was the case
submitted in the name of Manifest Destiny.

But this shining shield had a reverse side. The nation-
alist historians of Mexico present a different version of
Manifest Destiny. A ruthless and overbearing race of
men, greedy for land and trade, respecting no rights or
laws which barred their way, deliberately set themselves to
the work of despoiling their neighbor. They violated con-
tracts; they intruded themselves into Mexican territory
without passports or permits. Their official representatives
at the Mexican capital fomented domestic intrigues, at-
tempted to buy for a song what they intended to take by
violence, and shrank not from corruption in gaining their
ends. American citizens took part in revolutionary move-
ments to overthrow a friendly government; American naval
officers seized Mexican ports in time of peace, pulled down
the Mexican flag, and hoisted the Stars and Stripes. Finally,
Americans raised a revolution in Texas, tore that province
away from a peaceful republic, and then made war to get
more territory. Such was the Mexican view of the drama.

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 583
§

Although in this bitter controversy a judgment satisfac-
tory to both parties can hardly be rendered, a number of
pertinent facts force themselves upon the moralist who
feels compelled to hold a court of justice and mercy. Above
all it is necessary to take account of the state of Mexico
during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is the
fashion to speak of the “‘Mexican government,” the ‘‘Mex-
ican people,”’ and ‘“‘Mexican policies.’”’ Nothing could be
more misleading. Such terms, with some show of propriety,
may be used in referring to a settled country with a stable
government capable of representing the masses; but even
in such nations there are wild oscillations—like that which
occurred when the United States, repudiating Wilson and
the League of Nations, swung abruptly to Harding and iso-
lation. What seems to be perfidy is sometimes a perfectly
legitimate change of opinion.

In the case of Mexico during the period of American
pressure, the situation was extremely confused. Between
1800 and 1850, Mexico was not an orderly nation with an
authoritative government. At the opening of the century
it was a province of Spain. In 1810, it became the scene
of a war for independence which broke out with volcanic
force, raged for seven years through fluctuating fortunes,
and ended in suppression. After three years of peace came
a renewed uprising which culminated in 1821 in separa-
tion from Spain and the establishment of a provisional
government.

The next year, a military adventurer, Iturbide, aping the
pomp and ceremony of Czsar, was crowned emperor with
the title of Augustus I. In a few turbulent months, he was
overthrown and exiled; when he returned he was shot by
his former subjects. In 1824, a federal constitution, fash-
ioned on the American model and marked by certain demo-
cratic features, was established, followed by five years of
comparative peace. But underground went on a lively

584 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

political intrigue, with the American minister, Joel Poinsett,
aiding the liberal faction, until a revolt put a term to his
operations. .

In 1829, another military leader, Bustamante, rode into
power on the shoulders of a conservative clique, only to be
ousted, after three years of tenure, by a more efficient dis-
ciple of Machiavelli, Santa Anna, an extraordinary person
whose adventures for a quarter of a century rivaled the
exploits of a Don Quixote. In 1836, a clerical and highly
centralized constitution supplanted the fundamental law
erected twelve years before, nullifying all the sundry
‘‘plans’’ which had been concocted in the meantime. Within
a few months Bustamante was back in the saddle and Santa
Anna in revolt.

In four years, the tables were again turned: Santa Anna
was on top for another brief hour; and then driven from
the country in 1844. But nothing daunted him, neither
his defeat by the Texans at San Jacinto in 1836 nor ban-
ishment by his countrymen. Returning to Mexico in 1845,
with the help of the American government, he put himself
in a trice at the head of the army and led it in the war
against the country which had so recently befriended him.
He even survived the humiliation of disaster at the hands
of the American army; driven from Mexico once more, he
came back again, set up a dictatorship, and in 1853 assumed
the title of ‘Most Serene Highness.” After a short respite
he was expelled, only to reappear and live to a ripe old age.
Not until 1876 did he pass from the scene.

Whenever there was a stable government in Mexico dur-
ing these troubled decades, it was usually a tyranny. When-
ever popular elements were in power, political and personal
disputes distracted the country. The year 1847, which
marked the triumph of American arms in Mexico City, saw
three presidents in that capital.

To the superficial observer, therefore, the history of
Mexico between 1810 and 1850 seemed like a series of
disconnected military adventures without rhyme or reason;

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 585

but in reality this was not the whole story. There were
important elements running through it all with a fair degree
of consistency. A province was struggling desperately to
shake off the grip of Spain and to find itself. Indian peons,
serfs bound to the soil, were waging a peasants’ war against
feudal lords, lay and clerical, most of whom were of Spanish
origin; a clergy and aristocracy were playing their historic
roles; a small but active middle class, dallying with incendi-
ary doctrines of liberty, democracy, and self-government,
had taken up arms against feudal and ecclesiastical priv-
ileges; military adventurers, akin to those who filled Europe
with tumult for a thousand years after the dissolution of
the Pax Romana, were making the most of a crumbling
order. Yet in the midst of the discord, there were demon-
strations of national pride; domestic quarrels were hushed
in the presence of the Northern Eagle.

The theater in which this drama was staged was vast in
extent. Reaching from the boundaries of Guatemala on
the south, it spread out like a great fan to the borders of
Louisiana on the northeast and to the Pacific and the tower-
ing mountains of Upper California on the northwest. In
1810 it was inhabited by about six million Indians, pure
and mixed in blood, and sixty thousand people of Spanish
origin, nearly all concentrated in the region now embraced
within the republic of Mexico. A quarter of a century later
when the American drive really began, there were approxi-
mately only three thousand Mexicans of Spanish origin in
Texas and four thousand in California, a mere handful of
people composed mainly of priests and monks congregated
at the missions, soldiers nominally engaged in keeping order
among the subject Indians, and large landowners and cattle
raisers.

As may be imagined, the government of these widely
scattered settlers between 1810 and 1845 was feeble, erratic,
and fitful—presidents and dictators and congresses appear-
ing and disappearing in agitations that shook Mexico from
center to circumference. A policy adopted by one govern-

586 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ment was repudiated by the next; reforms well conceived in
spirit could not be executed for lack of power. Without
capital and without stability, harassed by revolutions and
debts, Mexico could not develop the resources and trade
of the northern empire to which she possessed the title of
parchment and seals. More than that, she could not occupy
it for the simple reason that she did not have the emigrants
for that enterprise.
§

Peering over the borders of this almost empty realm was
a restless, hardy, conquering people that had carried the
American empire westward with a rush and a roar. Almost
from the day when independence was declared, the frontier
sentinels of the United States had looked upon all the terri-
tory from the Mississippi to the Pacific as their property,
at least in the process of becoming; as the Germans would
say, im Begriff werden. The happy purchase of Louisiana,
in their opinion, only confirmed the inevitable.

When in the Florida-purchase treaty of 1819 John Q.
Adams, as Secretary of State, accepted the Sabine River,
instead of the Rio Grande, as the western boundary of
Louisiana, they thought that their interests had been be-
trayed by a narrow-minded aristocrat of the New England
seaboard. “I will never accept it,’’ blurted out Senator
Benton, the agricultural imperialist of Missouri. Clay like-
wise denounced the surrender of ‘Texas and Jackson favored
action on it as soon as eastern opinion could be reconciled
to ‘“‘further change.” We must “get the Texas country
back”? whenever it can be done “‘with peace and honor’’—

this was the statesman’s way of saying “‘at the inexorable
moment.”

While the ink was still wet on the Florida treaty fixing
the boundary of Louisiana at the Sabine River, the first
phase of the westward movement opened. In 1821 Moses
Austin, a Connecticut Yankee, who had made and lost a
fortune in Benton’s state, secured through the governor of

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 587

Texas, then a province of New Spain, a huge grant of land
on which to establish three hundred families—‘‘honest, in-
dustrious farmers and mechanics,’’ Catholic in religion, and
willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Spanish mon-
arch. Before he could execute his contract, however, death
blocked his project and the task fell to the lot of his high-
spirited heir, Stephen F. Austin. After surveying the
ground, the enterprising son chose a spot for his colony not
far from San Antonio and there founded a thriving Ameri-
can settlement composed of people drawn mainly from Ten-
nessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. To make sure of his
property rights, Austin obtained a confirmation from the
government of Mexico, which had now declared its inde-
pendence from Spain.

Austin’s grant was followed by similar concessions to
other impresarios, Mexican, American, English, Scotch,
and Irish, until substantially all of Texas was parceled out
among adventurers who promised to bring in colonists of
good character and Catholic faith, willing to swear alle-
giance to the Mexican republic. Americans, many of them
slave-owners, now streamed over the border, some to de-
velop grants, others without titles or claims, in search of
land and fortune. Although a few lawless individuals from
the frontier joined in the rush, most of the immigrants were
industrious, energetic, and God-fearing men and women
bent on establishing communities of the American type.
Within ten years there were about twenty thousand people
in ‘Texas; a decade under American direction had brought
more settlers than three hundred years of Spanish admin-
istration. To the rulers at Mexico City that was an alarm-
ing fact and when it was too late they tried to close the
floodgates at the Texas border.

Far away on the Pacific coast another American invasion
had begun without the formality of land grants and official
permits. In 1796, a merchantman from New England, with
the American ensign snapping at the masthead, careened
around the Horn, up along the coast, and into Monterey.

588 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

In the wake of this pioneer ship, other vessels quickly fol-
lowed, establishing at favorable ports lively markets for
eastern manufactures. Beads, knives, gunpowder, cotton
goods, pottery, and rum were traded for furs; the furs were
carried to Canton; and Chinese merchandise received in
return was taken back to Boston, New York, and Phila-
delphia. On a single expedition sometimes huge fortunes
were made. One captain in a few hours collected 560 otter
skins in exchange for goods that cost him less than two
dollars and sold the lot in Canton for $22,400. Another
Yankee bartered six hundred yards of cheap cotton cloth
for a bale of peltries worth nearly seven thousand dollars
in China.

Though Spanish law, and later, Mexican law, forbade
foreigners to trade along the Pacific coast, American busi-
ness enterprise, stimulated by reports of such alluring
profits, could not be stayed. Both the theory and the fact of
the local trade-monopoly, it is just to say, varied widely with
the fortunes of the government in the distant city of Mexico
and neither the Californians nor the visiting American mer-
chants paid much attention to the nice technicalities of the
situation. At all events commerce flourished in spite of
exclusive laws and blustering officials, linking by the
mystic cords of interest the Atlantic seaboard with far
places on the Pacific. All the visible benefits of Manifest
Destiny were not in Texas.

As long, however, as this traffic was limited to the sea,
there seemed to be no hidden eventualities in it, at least to
the Mexican officials in California; for when they thought
of the long voyage around the Horn, they acquired a false
sense of security. But just as they were about to settle
down to an enjoyment of their domain, they heard a lusty
knock at their eastern portals; intrepid American traders
shrinking from the perils of the stormy sea had braved the
dangers of parched deserts, frosty mountains, and hostile
Indians to reach them in another way.. While Stephen
Austin was busy with projects in Texas, in November, 1826,

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 589

Jedidiah Smith, a fur trader of Yankee extraction, appeared
at the door of the San Gabriel mission in southern Cali-
fornia with a party of trappers. Without asking the per-
mission of the Mexican governor or paying any heed to
passport formalities, he had come overland from St. Louis
in search of precious peltries. Indifferent to the curt
reception accorded him, this dauntless Smith defiantly
tramped the West for a decade or more, exploring the San
Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, cutting a way from Cali-
fornia to Oregon, and advertising the virtues of the country
to his fellow citizens ‘‘back East.”

The dike being breached, the trickle stole in, followed
by the flood. In 1829, Ewing Young opened a trade route
from Santa Fé. Twelve years later an organized expedition
of American settlers, under the leadership of John Bidwell,
literally staggered across desert and mountain, dogged by
thirst and hunger, into the fertile San Joaquin Valley. By
this time the word had gone forth: Richard H. Dana’s Two
Years Before the Mast, articles by Hall Kelley, and letters
by innumerable travelers were advertising the Pacific coast
to the East. The land was good and fair to look upon;
American editors said the United States must possess it; and
the federal government became much interested. Under
official auspices, John C. Frémont made two expeditions
overland to California in 1842-5, explaining when ques-
tioned by the Mexican governor that his interest was purely
scientific; yet it happened that an American army officer was
opportunely on the ground to give assistance in the conquest
of California when destiny struck the hour.

§

In fact, while American farmers and planters were rush-
ing into Texas, while New England sea captains were gar-
nering the trade of California, while pioneers were breaking
the land routes to the Pacific, the State Department at
Washington was very much on the alert—watching for an

590 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

occasion to follow economic penetration by political do-
minion. A few weeks after Adams was inaugurated Presi-
dent in 1825, his Secretary of State, Clay, wrote to the
American minister in Mexico, Poinsett, instructing him to
begin negotiation for the purchase of Texas, a commission
which Poinsett would have gladly fulfilled if he had been
able to make headway against the suspicious government
to which he was accredited. |

When, to his surprise, Poinsett was recalled for inter-
fering in the domestic politics of Mexico, President Jackson,
then at the American helm, selected as his successor a
hardy land speculator of the southwest, Anthony Butler,
and instructed him to open operations with a view to
acquiring first Texas and then California. Now Butler was
scarcely the man to carry out such an undertaking with tact
and taste. In more respects than one, his character was
deficient, Jackson himself being finally forced to confess that
Butler was a “‘liar” and a ‘“‘scamp,”’ and Sam Houston writ-
ing him down a “‘swindler and gambler.”’ In a final verdict
on the point, a modern historian, Justin H. Smith, after
flaying with a good deal of justice the Mexicans with whom
Butler negotiated, remarks calmly of the American minister:
‘Fle was a national disgrace . . . personally a bully and a
swashbuckler, ignorant at first of the Spanish language and
even the forms of diplomacy, shamefully careless about
legation affairs, wholly unprincipled as to methods, and by
the open testimony of two American consuls openly scan-
dalous in conduct.”’

Shortly after Butler’s arrival in Mexico City, the local
press announced that he had come to buy Texas, spreading
alarm among the politicians and patriots of Mexico. Beyond
question, the rumor was well founded—an American “trial
balloon”; for, as a matter of fact, Jackson had instructed
Butler to purchase Texas, after coolly warning the Mexican
government that the Americans on the spot ‘‘will declare
themselves independent of Mexico the moment they acquire
sufficient numbers.’”’ Since suavity was not a strong point

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 591

with Butler, this threat tied to an offer to buy failed to land
the prize. But, determined not to be balked by any super-
ficial propriety, Butler turned to bribery, proposing to
Jackson that several hundred thousand dollars be spent in
inducing Mexican officials to sell Texas to the Americans.
When Jackson received this astounding suggestion, he
expressed surprise that Butler had not sent it in cipher and
declared that bribery was far from his intention of course.
In guarded diplomatic language the President then in-
formed the expectant minister that the United States would
not undertake to control the distribution of the purchase
money among persons in Mexico who had held land grants
in Texas, warning him in the same breath to give ‘‘these
shrewd fellows no ground to charge you with any tampering
with officers to obtain the cession through corruption.”
Undismayed by the bribery hint, Jackson, after allowing
Butler to come to Washington to discuss the matter in
person, sent him back to Mexico City with orders to
buy California as well as Texas. Failing in this mission,
the high-handed minister then baldly advised the President
to seize some of the coveted territory by force. That was
too much for Old Hickory and, writing on the back of the
letter, “What a scamp!” he called Butler home to final
obscurity. Whatever may be said about the character of
the Mexican officials, humor, if not respect for diplomacy,
suggested drawing the veil over the American minister.

§

What negotiation failed to accomplish, the march of
events consummated. While countless notes were being ex-
changed by the governments of the United States and
Mexico, the state of Texas was slipping away from the
Mexican republic as rumors of Austin’s colonizing scheme
flew far and wide, even crossing the Atlantic, and arousing
the cupidity of English, Irish, and Scotch adventurers.
During all the diplomatic wrangling, the offices of adminis-

592 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tration in Mexico City were jammed with promoters beg-
ging and wringing huge grants of land from men none too
scrupulous. Few, it seems, were turned away. Within
little more than a decade practically the whole of Texas
had been distributed among land contractors, the names
of Austin, Beale, Williams, Cameron, McMullin, McGloine,
Whelin, Zavalla, and Felisola being mingled with strange
profusion in the land records of the Mexican capital and
written large on the map of Texas.

All these contractors, regardless of their real motive,
undertook to import a given number of families in return
for a certain acreage. Under official seal, they bound
themselves to bring in people of good repute—Catholic in
religion and prepared to profess allegiance to the Mexican
republic. Having secured their grants and made their
pledges, the promoters then issued notes or scrip represent-
ing claims to holdings of various amounts, hoping by adver-
tisements and the sale of paper rights to secure immigrants
or at least to make a profit out of the ‘‘deal.”

In this fashion the news of activities in Texas spread all
the way from New Orleans to Boston, as Texas scrip
flooded the country. In the ‘fabulous forties” ancestors
of people who were long afterwards to buy oil stocks with
savage avidity bought up land notes at a few cents on the
dollar in the firm conviction that the federal government
would aid in realizing on the risks. Their fever penetrated
other countries; stories of the New El Dorado flew over
the sea to Dublin, London, and Edinburgh, attracting to
Texas streams of immigrants from all quarters. By 1835
there were more than twenty thousand invaders in that
flourishing province—hardy farmers, lordly planters, droves
of slaves, hunters, adventurers, and outlaws. Great events
were impending.

Frightened by the diplomacy of Jackson and alarmed at
the swarms of aliens crossing the border, the officials at
Mexico City drew back in dismay. When it was too late
they tried to recover their passing dominion with laws and

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 593

proclamations which only advanced ‘the day”’ by arousing
more opposition among the American settlers in Texas and
among the holders of scrip everywhere. In 1829, a decree
of the Mexican government abolished slavery; but a vig-
orous protest from American settlers compelled it to ex-
empt Texas from the operation of the order.

About the same time a reactionary revolution put Busta-
mante in the saddle, swept away the liberal constitution of
1824, and forcibly united the two states of Texas and
Coahuila, evoking from the Americans on the spot an angry
outcry. Not yet submissive to events, the Mexican govern-
ment then forbade the importation of slaves, required immi-
grants to present passports, ordered the expulsion of squat-
ters who could not show lawful titles to their lands, and
tentatively abrogated all the land contracts which had not
been fulfiled by the promoters, thereby bringing distress to
the hearts of land speculators scattered from the banks of
the Brazos to the banks of the Thames.

On top of this combustible material was thrown a
quarrel over taxation—always a sore point with the Anglo-
Saxon. In 1831, on the expiration of an agreement ex-
empting colonists from duties on certain imports for a
period of seven years, Mexican officials proceeded in due
form to collect taxes according to schedule—in a peremp-
tory and irregular manner, the Americans alleged—stirring
wrath from Natchidoches to San Antonio. Finally, as if
defying fate, Santa Anna, acting in his capacity as dictator,
denied the petition of Texas for separate statehood. Imme-
diately, the Sam Adamses and the Patrick Henrys of the
southwest went into caucus. Nothing but a match was
needed again to fire the powder train and spring the mine.

This little spark was furnished by Colonel William B.
Travis, an impetuous American, who, against the wishes of
the more conservative elements in Texas, organized a small
force, made an attack on the hated customs office, and ex-
pelled the Mexican revenue collector, bag and baggage.
Following this ominous action, a number of Americans took

594 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the side of a Mexican adventurer in a revolutionary assault
on Tampico with the object of unhorsing Santa Anna. From
this it was but a step to open resistance. By the advocates
of self-government, an appeal was made to friends in the
United States for money and men; a declaration of local
autonomy was issued in November, 1835; before two
months had passed the last Mexican soldier had been driven
across the border; and early the next year the independence
of Texas was formally proclaimed.

Though torn by internal dissensions, the government of
Mexico could not overlook these acts of defiance. Placing
himself at the head of experienced troops, Santa Anna
swept northward “‘to restore order.”’ For a time fortune
seemed to be with him, for the first clashes resulted in vic-
tories, such as they were. In March, 1836, a small band
of ‘Texans, embattled under Colonel Travis in the Alamo at
San Antonio, was utterly destroyed in one of the most des-
perate struggles ever waged on the American continent. A
few days later another group of Texans, three hundred and
fifty in number, was overwhelmed by a superior force and
shot in cold blood, an act of cruelty which the Mexicans
tried to defend as “‘justice meted out to traitors.”

This deed proved to be their undoing, for the Texans
were now thoroughly aroused and strongly united. Under
General Sam Houston, their little army of independence
fell upon Santa Anna on the banks of the San Jacinto River.
With the shout ‘‘Remember the Alamo!” and in a tumultu-
ous rush, they carried everything by storm, killing nearly
half the Mexican army and capturing most of the foemen
who escaped the sword, including Santa Anna himself. In
their fury the avenging Texans demanded the life of the
Mexican commander but in the end Houston saved him
from the firing squad, wrung from him an official recogni-
tion of Texan independence, and then sent him under escort
into the United States.

Having cleared their soil of Mexican soldiers and taken
their place ‘among the independent nations of the earth,”’

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 595

the Texans turned with eager expectancy to the United
States, hoping for admission to the Union. Among the
statesmen of the South they met cordial sympathy. They
had assured the planting interest by writing in their con-
stitution one clause forbidding the legislature to prohibit the
importation of slaves by immigrants from the United States
and another clause forbidding it ever to proclaim a general
liberation of bondmen. So the answer to the Texan over-
ture was emphatic in the South: Mississippi, Alabama, and
Tennessee by solemn resolution called upon Congress to
admit the Lone Star State to the Union.

The Texans also had a sympathizer in Jackson, the
trusted friend of their own president, General Sam Hous-
ton; but Jackson, though personally willing, acted cau-
tiously. A national campaign was on in 1836, the Whig
opposition in the Senate was too formidable to be flouted,
and mustering a two-thirds vote in favor of a treaty of
annexation was clearly impossible. Consequently Jackson
left the White House without adding Texas to his beloved
Union. |

For years after Jackson’s retirement, the country was
agitated over the question of annexation. Miild critics of
slavery protested against it. Abolitionists raged with all
their might. ‘‘I trust, indeed,’ exclaimed William E. Chan-
ning, ‘“‘that Providence will beat back and humble our
cupidity and ambition. I now ask whether as a people we
are prepared to seize on a neighboring territory to the end
of extending slavery? I ask whether as a people we can
stand forth in the sight of God, in the sight of nations, and
adopt this atrocious policy? Sooner perish! Sooner our
name be blotted out from the record of nations!’ With a
shout of defiance, William Lloyd Garrison called for the
secession of the northern states if Texas came into the
Union with her slaves. Recalling his classical studies, John
Quincy Adams prophesied the fate of imperial Rome as the
just doom of imperial America. Even conservative men
who did not condemn slavery trembled at the thought of

$96 THE RISE\ OF AMERICAN | CIVILIZATION

reopening the bitter dispute that had been closed, they
thought, by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Amid this tempest of opposition, southern champions of
annexation pursued their course with fixed resolution. To
them it at last offered security for their peculiar institution
against the overwhelming predominance of the free states.
Texas was an empire in itself; four or five large common-
wealths could be carved out of its generous expanse and
given eight or ten United States Senators to balance the
representatives from Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and other
free states as they arrived one after another upon the
floor of the upper chamber. If that project could be real-
ized, the North might have the House of Representatives;
it could not enact into law any economic policies detrimental
to the planting interest as long as the South possessed equal-
ity in the Senate.

To the watchful Calhoun annexation, carrying with it
these implications, promised the only guarantee for the per-
petuity of the Constitution. Little did he dream that the
action which he fondly imagined could save the Union and
slavery would in reality reopen the sectional controversy,
precipitate a civil conflict, and end in the destruction of
chattel bondage itself. So dim is the vision of the wisest
of statesmen! So far astray do the calculations of the
learned and the great lead them! ‘That which the planting
interest thought would save slavery helped to destroy it.
That which ardent abolitionists fancied would fasten slavery
upon the country forever hastened emancipation.

Though the planters were easily won by the delusive
argument that proved to be their destruction, they were
not strong enough in Congress to carry the annexation of
Texas. It was necessary to win votes above the Potomac
where abolitionists were thundering against it day and night,
where there seemed to be no powerful economic support for
the addition of distant territory, nothing to appeal to save
the showy doctrine of Manifest Destiny. But appearances
were deceptive. In reality there were also in the North

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC SFT

substantial forces working in favor of annexation—forces
having in view more immediate, direct, and tangible
gains than those offered to the planting interests of the
South.

In the financial sections of every large community, quan-
tities of Texas scrip were afloat, as we have seen. In New
York City, for example, three land companies, organized
to buy claims of doubtful validity, had issued stocks to a
gullible public. With these stocks ran current a deep suspl-
cion that the authorities of Mexico would never accept the
claims as lawful and that a revolution ending in the estab-
lishment of a stable government in Texas under American
auspices would be necessary to put profits into the pockets
of those who purchased such wild-cat paper. This was like-
wise true with respect to many other forms of speculative
land securities which passed from hand to hand in the
North. In a word, the independence of Texas, the admis-
sion of Texas to the Union, and the confirmation of acquired
land rights were essential to realizing the inflated hopes
founded on an immense volume of paper scattered around
through the United States.

Even more important in this momentous contest perhaps -
was the huge quantity of bonds and notes floated by the
republic of ‘Texas after its declaration of independence.
Like the United States at the beginning of the American
Revolution, it had been started on paper. On paper it tried
to survive, its finances growing steadily worse from year
to year. In 1838, its secretary of the treasury reported
an outstanding debt of $1,886,425; in 1841 he dolefully
admitted that the expenditures for the year had been
$1,176,288 and the receipts only $442,604; by 1845 the
treasury was in complete chaos, the debt being then vari-
ously reckoned from $7,000,000 to $12,000,000. Every
day the paper sank lower, to the dismay of those who held
it; bonds and notes drawing eight per cent interest were
selling on the streets of the capital at a price as low as
three cents on the dollar.

598 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Suddenly these securities appeared in many parts of the
United States. Having subscribed to the first loans floated
to finance the Texas revolution, Americans bought blocks
of subsequent issues emitted to sustain it. Speculators in
Texas acquired a large quantity at ridiculous figures and
sent it flying across the border in all directions, into the Mis-
sissippi valley and to New York by steamer. There was no
enigma in this. It was obvious to everybody who held any
of the vagrant paper or knew anything about the failing
security behind it that the annexation of Texas and the
stabilization of its finances could alone prevent its bonds
and notes from becoming worthless, destroying real values
as well as potential profits for the holders.

How widespread was the influence of the speculators in
Texas paper cannot be estimated with any degree of exact-
ness, for the distribution of the bonds and notes is not
known. We have, however, the testimony of Jay Cooke,
the financier of the Civil War, on this point. He was asso-
ciated, during the Texan controversy, with a Philadelphia
banking house that later handled the government’s fiscal
business during the Mexican War, and, therefore, in a posi-
tion to speak with no little authority. And according to his
careful biographer, E. P. Oberholtzer, who had access ta
the family papers, ““Mr. Cooke always believed that the
northern opposition in Congress to the addition of this large
slave territory to the national domain was overcome
through the selfish exertions in their own interest of the
holders of the Texas debt certificates, many of whom were
influential northern men.”

That this economic pressure was far-reaching became sig-
nally evident in 1850 during the congressional debate on the
bill adjusting the boundary between Texas and New Mexico
—a measure carrying an indemnity to Texas of $10,000,000
to be applied in part on her debt. The very introduction cf
the indemnity project swept the price of Texas bonds up-
ward from four or five cents on the dollar to fifty cents.
Amid great excitement the Senate passed the bill with

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 599

alacrity and all was going smoothly when suddenly, to the
agony of interested parties, the House of Representatives
defeated it.

Then came a royal battle for reconsideration which, after
many days of hard work, was effected with a “‘loud cry of
exultation.”” On the day the vote was finally taken on the
bill, lobbyists pressed around the desks of the Representa-
tives in such force that one of. the members asked for their
removal from the floor, remarking drily that Texas bond-
holders could see and hear as well from the galleries.
According to Joshua R. Giddings, a congressman from
Ohio, three million dollars worth of the paper was afloat
in Washington at the time and members were offered as
much as fifty thousand dollars apiece for their votes.
Though this was possibly a mere surmise, there was no
doubt that the depreciated bonds and scrip played an im-
portant part in the movement for annexation of Texas from
her declaration of independence in 1836 to her admission
to the Union.

§

In the decade which followed the independence of Texas,
while the planting interest, the speculative interest, the land
interest, and Manifest Destiny were preparing the way for
annexation, both diplomacy and immigration were swinging
California into the American orbit. By 1840 Mexican occu-
pation of that vast province was merely a shadow on the
land. The entire army in control did not exceed five hun-
dred regular soldiers, scattered among half a dozen pre-
sidios; while no serious pretensions were made at ruling the
region north of San Francisco Bay. ‘The weak and chang-
ing government at Mexico City, far removed from the scene
and confining its activities mainly to passing messages to
and fro once or twice a year, could not possibly administer
the province efficiently or restrain the foreign invaders who
came from every direction. It could issue decrees but it
could not enforce them. It could awaken opposition and

600 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

revolt but could not crush them. At no time could it count
on much local support.

As a matter of fact there was little available, for the
country, besides being far away, was sparsely settled.
Within its borders were only a few tiny towns—San Diego,
Los Angeles, Monterey, and Yerba Buena on the site of
present-day San Francisco—and the trade in their markets
was almost entirely in the hands of Americans. Sprawling
over the intervening stretches were the estates of Spanish
grandees, vast, uncultivated, and unprofitable dominions.
Here and there were old Spanish missions which once had
been the seats of prosperous economic life under the direc-
tion of shrewd and competent managers, but even they had
now sunk into decay because the lands had been secularized
in 1834 and bought up by Mexican adventurers and Ameri-
can merchants. In short, California was a wide-open prov-
ince awaiting the drive of a virile, active, organizing people
while all over the United States were restless persons read-
ing about the distant El Dorado in innumerable pamphlets,
books, and inspired newspaper articles.

So the great American migration commenced. In May,
1841, a party of men, women, and children, under the
leadership of John Bidwell, “the prince of California
pioneers,” set out from Missouri to the promised land.
Compared to the trials and sufferings endured by this party
on its tedious journey of six months, the hardships of the
voyagers in the Mayflower seem positively slight. The
colonial Pilgrims were in the hands of good sailors who
knew the sea and the stars and were at home on the wide
ocean paths. ‘The Bidwell adventurers, on the contrary,
crossed an almost uncharted continent, their wisest guides
knowing little about the route save that it lay in a westerly
direction.

For days they toiled through the horrors of the alkaline
desert where thirst consumed them and where mirages lured
them to agonizing delusions. After terrible experiences they
arrived at the mountain wall where, compelled to cast off

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 601

and abandon their heavy baggage, they soon came face to
face with starvation; before they got over the barrier they
were so tormented by hunger that a bit of broiled fat from
the windpipe of a coyote seemed a rare delicacy. Certainly
the events of this path-breaking expedition recorded in the
journal left to posterity by Bidwell, though not as celebrated
in annals of history as the doings of the Pilgrims immortal-
ized by Bradford, deserve their vivid chapter in the great
American epic.

And yet the Bidwell pioneers fared happily as compared
with the Donner party that followed them five years later.
Starting merrily in the early spring of 1846 also from
Missouri, the second band of emigrants crossed the plains
and desert without serious mishap; but while they were on
their way over the mountains the members of one division
were caught in the icy grip of an early winter. Seeing that
they could neither go forward nor retrace their steps, they
hastily threw up huts of wood and turf against the cutting
blasts and towering snow drifts.

In these wretched shanties, men, women, and children
huddled for months; all food failed them except oxhide
soup and pounded bones; some of them were driven in their
indescribable misery to eat the flesh of their dead. Recoiling
from this abyss of madness, nine men and six women made
a desperate dash across the snow-bound mountains. ‘Two
men and five women, overcoming the perils of the journey,
at last carried the tale of horror to the settlements of Cali-
fornia. Immediately volunteers sprang to the rescue, scaled
the mountains and brought the survivors at the camp on to
safety. Of the seventy-nine who wintered in the huts of
death, forty-five endured the terrible ordeal—among whom
were women with children at their breasts. In the middle
of a cabin the rescue party found only one living inhabitant,
a breathing skeleton, surrounded by nameless horror, dis-
ordered in mind, and evidently guilty of awful deeds that
made him an outcast in Sacramento Valley to the end of
his days.

602 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

If anyone had doubts about the latent powers of civilized
women, their fierce will to live, their resolution in the pres-
ence of the jungle’s law, their heroism when faced by seem-
ingly impossible choices, and their capacity to bring from
the unfathomed deeps of their nature resources for unex-
pected trial, he found a new version of humanity in the
story of the Donner migration. Manifest Destiny was
in the hands of people with unbreakable will and an un-
yielding courage.

§

While events were bringing California into the American
sphere, diplomacy was searching for sanction. The records
do not disclose the name of the statesman who first thought
of the maneuvre, but it is certain that President Jackson
fully appreciated it. He knew the West and was imperial
in temper. As we have said, he instructed the American
minister in Mexico City to secure California in connection
with the purchase of Texas. Ata later date, he also encour-
aged the agent of Texas in Washington to hope for stronger
support from the United States in case California could be
added by some procedure to the empire of the Lone Star
State, thinking no doubt that this would make annexation
more palatable to the shipowners and merchants of Phila-
delphia, New York, and Boston. It would assure them
trading bases and good harbors on the western coast, help-
ing to unite capitalists and planters in a common enterprise.

Though the idea had force, Jackson was compelled by
circumstances to leave the White House without executing
his expansion program. For the moment enthusiasm waned.
Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, was lukewarm on the
project; at heart he was an opponent of slavery, and he
could plead domestic financial troubles as a good reason
for inaction in foreign affairs. So four years slipped by
without a decision. But when Tyler of Virginia came to
the presidency, the tide began to turn. He knew what
he wanted, yet, like Jackson, he too had to be cautious in

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 603

making public gestures; for he had been elected with a Whig
candidate to enlist planting support and was compelled to
cooperate, nominally at least, with the Whigs. In dealing
with Congress, Tyler accordingly chose discretion as the
better part of valor.

In the sphere of diplomatic action, however, where the
veil of secrecy hid all things, Tyler moved with swiftness
and resolution, supported by his efficient Secretary of State,
Webster, who was as eager to secure points of support for
whaling and the China trade in the Pacific as Calhoun was
to get Texas for the planters. Working in perfect har-
mony, the President and Webster tried to get hold of
California. They bombarded the Mexican government
with claims, notes, demands, and proposals until the atmos-
phere was charged with the mysterious electricity of rumor.

The American navy was put on the watch. In fact, one
of its officers, Commodore Jones, allowed his wishes to
overcome prudence, when, in 1842, in command of a frigate
and a sloop, he sailed into Monterey Bay, seized the town,
and ran up the Stars and Stripes on the strength of a vague
report that war had broken out between Mexico and the
United States and that California might be handed over
to England. Though Jones pulled down the flag as grace-
fully as possible when he found his information baseless, the .
incident had lasting effects. It helped to confirm the Mexi-
cans in their opposition to surrendering California to the
United States without a blow. So after Commodore Jones
_had displayed the mailed fist, diplomacy was more powerless
than ever to achieve a peaceful annexation of California.

It was thus made evident that nothing but a crisis could
bring down the fruit, and deeds did finally take matters out
of the control of the diplomats—a turn in events favored
by the drift of affairs on the Coast. As time passed, the
military grip of Mexico on California, which had always
been weak, steadily relaxed; of the army of occupation now
numbering about six hundred, one-half were Mexicans and
one-half natives of California, an unpaid, undisciplined,

604 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and poorly equipped rabble. On more than one occasion,
when a foreign vessel fired a salute of honor in a Cali-
fornia harbor, the local Mexican officer had to borrow
powder from his visitor to return the greeting. Even more
absurd was the Mexican navy in the Pacific, consisting as
it did of one weatherbeaten ship, so crazed with age and
hard wear that the captain could not sail her against
the wind.

While Mexican defenses were collapsing, Americans in
California were growing in numbers and influence. They
were not long in discovering that a very slight rebellion
might cut the thread which bound the province to Mexico
and they often took part in factional disputes among the
Californians in the hope that good fortune would finally
perch on their standards. All they needed was a little en-
couragement from Washington and shortly after the inau-
guration of Polk in 1845 they received it.

The new President was scarcely installed when he coolly
told his Cabinet that California was to be annexed.
To give effect to his plans, he informed the American consul
on the Coast that the government of the United States
would protect the people of California if they cut loose
from Mexico and-he authorized that official to use his own
discretion in handling local affairs. ‘This suggestion was a
keen anticipation of history; the very next year, before the
news of the outbreak of war between Mexico and the
United States reached the Pacific shore, a handful of ad-
venturous Americans, aided by Captain Frémont, nom-
inally engaged in scientific exploration, raised the standard ©
of revolution—the Bear Flag—and proclaimed the Repub-
lic of California. The moment so impatiently awaited by
the administration at Washington was at hand.

§
Not long after the Bear Flag was flung to the breeze
war began between Mexico and the United States. The
crisis had at last been precipitated by the annexation of

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 605

Texas. As the sponsors of that project in Washington had
never been able to muster the two-thirds majority necessary
to carry their treaty through the Senate, they finally grew
desperate and resorted to a joint resolution of both houses
which called for a mere majority. The conclusion was fore-
gone. In February, 1845, during the closing days of Tyler’s
administration, Texas was made a part of the American
Union by act of Congress. A spark was applied to tinder.
Since Mexico had never recognized or accepted the inde-
pendence of Texas, annexation, as everybody knew, was a
signal for the rupture of relations—a step which led the
‘Mexican minister promptly to gather up his papers and go
home.

It was at this point that Tyler was succeeded by Polk,
of Tennessee, who, we have seen, was bent on adding Cali-
fornia to the Texan prize, without war if possible. While
Polk was really pacific in temper and hoped to accomplish
much without shedding blood, he did not confine his efforts
to diplomatic notes. Rather, on coming into office, he made
preparations to defend Texas, now a part of the United
States, and, as already noted too, told the American consul
in California, in effect, that he would be supported if he
stirred up a local revolution.

As if to expedite matters, an argument arose with Mexico
over a boundary question—out of Texan claims to all the
land west and south as far as the Rio Grande and Mexican
insistence on fixing the border at the Nueces River and a
line drawn in a northerly direction. President Polk felt
constrained to accept the Texan view and, not unnaturally,
having made his decision, ordered General Zachary Taylor,
in command of American forces, forward into the disputed
zone. This movement, regarded as an act of defense by
Americans, was denounced by Mexicans as a clear invasion
of their country. In the spring of 1846, a clash of arms
took place, staining the sands of ‘Texas red with blood.

‘War exists by act of Mexico!” cried Polk, and his cry
was echoed among his followers with interest, Congress

606 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

quickly responding by declaring its confidence with a vote of
men and money for the prosecution of American rights by
arms. And yet there was no little opposition among the
northern Whigs, some of it sincere and some of it partisan.
Abraham Lincoln, then serving his single term in the House
of Representatives, lifted his voice against the war, appar-
ently with no other result than to throw away his chances
for reélection. Senator Corwin of Ohio flung out to the
presidential party his famous defiance that haunted him
until the end of his political career: “If I were a Mexican
I would tell you: ‘Have you not room in your own country?
. . . If you come into mine, we will greet you with bloody
hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ”’

On the floor of the House, Corwin’s colleague, Joshua
R. Giddings, condemned the proceedings as “‘a war against
an unoffending people, without adequate or just cause, for
the purpose of conquest; with the design of extending
slavery; in violation of the Constitution, against the dictates
of justice, humanity, the sentiments of the age in which we
live, and the precepts of the religion which we profess. I
will lend it no aid, no support whatever. I will not bathe
my hands in the blood of the people of Mexico, nor will
I participate in the guilt of those murders which have been
and will hereafter be committed by our army there. For
these reasons I shall vote against the bill under considera-
tion and all others calculated to support the war.”’ Through
New England also flowed a strong current of feeling
against Polk’s policies and measures, the legislature of
Massachusetts, for example, overwhelming by a negative
vote a proposal to appropriate funds in aid of a regiment
raised by Caleb Cushing; while meetings of protest against
the war were held in Faneuil Hall.

_ Angered by action which they deemed seditious, defend-
ers of the administration spared no invective in flaying its
critics. Speaking for his Illinois constituents, Stephen A.
Douglas declared in the Senate: ‘‘America wants no friends,
acknowledges the fidelity of no citizen who, after war is

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC — 607

declared, condemns the justice of her cause or sympathizes
with the enemy. All such are traitors in their hearts; and
would to God that they would commit such overt act for
which they could be dealt with according to their deserts.”
A close student of the Constitution, Douglas, even so, had
either forgotten his history or could not divine the limitless
possibilities of sedition laws. If “the Little Giant of Illi-
nois” had been ingenious enough, James Russell Lowell’s
Biglow Papers would have landed the author in jail and
the men and women who could not see the justice of the
American cause would have been given ten or fifteen years
behind prison bars in which to meditate upon the mutability
of human affairs.

- The war thus precipitated by ‘‘act of Mexico” was prose-
cuted with vigor by the United States. General Taylor,
already on the frontier with a large body of troops, drove
southward into Mexico, winning before the lapse of a year
four victories, at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Mon-
terey, and Buena Vista. Indeed he might have delivered
the fatal thrust if politics had not intervened. But Taylor
was a Whig and Polk, knowing full well American love
for military heroes, was anxious to avoid raising up another
victorious commander for the opposition to nominate for
the presidency. Besides, good strategy was in harmony
with politics—the line held by General Taylor was long and
as he marched into the interior he left his base of supplies
far in the rear.

So the administration at Washington, deciding to divide
the honors, sent a second army under General Scott, also
a Whig, by sea to Vera Cruz for the purpose of striking
directly at Mexico City. In August, 1847, the project was
accomplished: the American army was at the gates of the
capital of Mexico. If the government of that republic had
possessed any strength, peace would have been quickly con-
cluded, but to yield to humiliating terms was beyond the
power of any Mexican authority. Not until battles were
fought in the suburbs of the city and the American army

608 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

marched triumphantly into the Plaza de la Constitucién—
not until the American general offered protection to the
defeated government, threatened by rival factions, could a
treaty of peace be signed.

Far away on the California Coast military and naval
operations on a smaller scale were completing the work of
Manifest Destiny. In June, 1845, months before the con-
flict with Mexico started, the Secretary of the Navy in-
structed Commodore Sloat, commander of the American
forces in the Pacific, to seize the harbors of California
immediately on receipt of news that war had begun.
Accordingly, as soon as the instructions arrived in July of
the following year, Sloat occupied Monterey without resist-
ance and hoisted the American flag. Coming on the scene
a few days later, his successor, Commodore Stockton, took
charge of affairs, enrolled the men of Frémont’s young
republic in the American army, and started the conquest of
California, assisted in the operation by a small body of
regular soldiers, under General S. W. Kearny, who reached
California in December after a toilsome overland journey
from Fort Leavenworth by way of Santa Fé. A few sharp
clashes, hardly to be characterized as battles, sealed the
inevitable. The whalers, the China traders, the Bidwells,
and the Donners had done their work. California became
American soil.

On February 2, 1848, a formal treaty with Mexico closed
this chapter in American history, sealing the annexation of
Texas and ceding to the United States California, Arizona,
New Mexico, and other large fragments—a domain greater
in area than Germany and France combined. Thus Mexico
lost, if Texas is counted, more than one-half the territory
she possessed when she made the first contract with Moses
Austin for American colonization, receiving as a balm noth-
ing except the cancellation of certain American claims for
damages and fifteen million dollars in cash. In 1853,
through the negotiations of James Gadsden, the United
States secured another cession of land along the southern

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 609

border of Arizona and New Mexico in return for a payment
of ten million dollars.

Thus a collision which a modern historian, Herbert
Ingram Priestley, characterizes as ‘‘a biological phenome-
non”’ was brought to a conclusion fortunate for the victor.
The Americans who favored annexing the whole of Mexico
or at least holding all the territory in the north conquered
by General Taylor, after some grumbling, accepted the
gains of the settlement as the best that could be accom-
plished in the circumstances.

§

On top of this victory came an astounding piece of sheer
luck. In January, 1848, while the commissioners were still
haggling in Mexico City over the terms of peace, James W.
Marshall, a laborer employed by John A. Sutter in his saw
mill on the American River, discovered in the tail race
something that glittered and was gold. This was not, of
course, the first time that the precious metal had been found
in the soil of California for the Mexicans had previously
unearthed deposits; but for some strange reason the spir-
itual heirs of Cortez and Pizarro who had searched with
feverish eagerness the valleys and mountains of Mexico
had not swarmed with pick and pan into promising fields
of the Coast. By a strange fatality which an Anglo-Saxon
might call ‘‘Providential,” the great discovery was delayed
until American occupation arrived.

At first Sutter was not overjoyed with his fortune.
Knowing that it would upset the normal course of agri-
culture and industry, he tried to keep silence, but, as that
was a strain too severe for human nature, the news slowly
leaked out. By May it was passing current as a rumor in
the streets of Monterey—a bit of vague gossip that was
turned into truth by an investigator sent to the spot to
inquire. Immediately a spasm of frenzied lust burst out
in every California community. Artisans dropped their

610 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tools, farmers left their cattle to die and their crops to rot,
lawyers fled from clients, teachers threw aside their books,
preachers cast off their cloth, sailors deserted their ships in
the harbors, and women left their kitchens—all in one over-
whelming rush for the gold-bearing district. Business
ceased in the towns; real estate slumped; deserted houses
and shops sank into decay. From every direction fortune-
hunters swept down like locusts on the region around
Sutter’s mill, with dishpans and skillets for washing gold
and plowshares beaten into picks and shovels.

From day to day, the acquisitive instincts of the miners
were aggravated by tales that floated on every breeze. In
the course of a week, it was said, two men found $17,000
worth of gold ona single spot containing only a few hundred
square feet; a poor journalist armed with a pick, a shovel,
and a pan gathered in a hundred dollars in a few hours; a
workingman washed out two pounds and a half of gold in
fifteen minutes. Even when all discounts were made, re-
ports showed that in less than six months more than half
a million dollars worth of precious metal had been wrested
from the river drift and the hills.

Before winter came, the news in authentic form had
reached the East, President Polk commenting on it officially
in his message of December, 1848. Ina flash the pages of
the newspapers were packed with rumors, letters, and tales
referring to the gold rush, and companies were formed to
make expeditions to the scene of buried treasure. With
their wonted enterprise merchants advertised goods suited
to the needs of men bound for the gold fields—guide books,
camping outfits, miners’ tools and canned sauerkraut ‘‘war-
ranted for twenty-one years.’ A_ hustling promoter
organized a band of women, ‘‘none under twenty-five,” to
go out and marry the successful miners. Photographers
urged departing fortune-hunters to leave behind daguerreo-
types for their loved ones. Druggists announced specifics
for all the ills that afflict the flesh of mortals, and fakers
patent devices for locating rich gold-bearing soils.

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 611

From eastern cities the sensation spread to Great Brit-
ain and Ireland and then to the distant villages of the Con-
tinent, arousing so much cupidity that every vessel sailing
from Europe was immediately furnished with a full quota
of prospectors bent on reaching the Pacific Coast at the
earliest possible moment. Along the docks, in the shops
and hotels, at wayside taverns, in the stage coaches and
canal-boat cabins, all conversation was devoted to the one
absorbing theme—gold in California. The chantie of the
Argonaut ran through the country:

Oh! California, that’s the land for me!
I’m bound for Sacramento

With the washbowl on my knee.

Before the adventurers, booked for the gold fields, lay
a choice of many routes, three involving journeys by water.
An all-sea voyage carried them around the Horn in a long
and tedious trip that occupied from six to nine months. A
more popular route lay through Panama and in a short time
that narrow strip, where dull monotony had reigned almost
uninterruptedly since Balboa’s day, became the scene of stir-
ring events, as thousands of Americans and Europeans
swarmed in and out dreaming of riches in California. A
third route, also including two sea trips, was by way of Mex-
ico) On the score of safety there was little to choose.
Since every kind of crazy craft strong enough to move
out of an eastern harbor was employed in the business of
transporting prospectors, the risks of all the voyages by
water were extremely high. Many a ship that sailed away
with singing fortune-hunters disappeared without leaving
a sign, a rumor, or an echo to hint at the fate of crew and
passengers. Those who tried to go by way of Panama or
Mexico usually encountered, besides the dangers of the sea,
cholera, scurvy, and Chagres fever. Scores who escaped
disease were stripped of their money and murdered by
robbers.

Though presumably more safe, the continental routes to

612 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

California offered hazards of their own. On the two north
ern roads, one by way of Salt Lake and the Truckee River
and the other the Oregon Trail, emigrants had to run the
long gantlet of barren plains and mountain passes. Even
worse was the southern trail through Santa Fé—worse for
the torrid heat of parched deserts often sent the thermom-
eter up to 140°, driving prospectors hopelessly insane and
then to a wretched death on the sands. Along all the lines,
thirst, starvation, storms, Indians, and disease dogged the
steps of the wayfarer. From the frontier to the coast,
wrecks of wagons, bones of oxen, and graves of dead emi-
grants marked the paths of the venturesome gold-seeker,
fifteen hundred silent mounds, we are told, dotting the road
from Salt Lake to Sacramento.

But none of these things turned the gold hunters from
their purpose. Before the first quarter of 1849 had ex-
pired, at least seventeen thousand sailed away from the
eastern shores. In less than one month, during the spring
that followed, eighteen thousand people crossed the Mis-
souri River en route to California. How many started,
how many perished on the journey, how many arrived
safely is nowhere accurately recorded. But the census of
1850 gave California 92,000 inhabitants, and within ten
years the number had grown to 380,000. When it is re-
called that the colonizing movement of the seventeenth cen-
tury did not carry more than thirty or forty thousand
Puritans to New England in the course of a hundred years,
the magnitude of the famous gold rush of 1849 assumes its
true proportions.

But how different the two migrations! It was the lure
of a quick and easy fortune that swept most of the gold-rush
immigrants into California—reckless adventurers fond of
hard drinking, gambling, and fighting, offering a curious
contrast to the godly men who sought a humble livelihood
by hard work under the leadership of Winthrop and Carver.
Not many took families along. Indeed, relatively few
women went out in the first days of roaring luck and some of

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 613

those who did were, to say the least, not Puritans either.
In the names of the mining towns were reflected the tastes
of the occupants; in place of the Providences, Goshens,
Salems, and Bethels of New England, there rose Slum-
gullions, You-Bets, and Jackass-Gulches. When the miner
burst into song, he chose ‘‘Highland Mary,” camp dog-
gerel, or a drinking chant, rather than the Psalms of David.
Even some “‘good citizens’? were not ashamed to walk down
the main street of Poverty Flat with women who would
have had to wear the Scarlet Letter in queer old Salem.

For years the exuberance and tempestuous life of the
mining camps affected the character of the whole territory,
not excepting the districts-in the south devoted to cattle
raising, grain fields, and vineyards. Even the distant and
relatively peaceful city of Los Angeles could report in 1854
a murder a day on the average. ‘The Queen of the Cow
Counties,” wrote a vivacious editor of that town, “‘bangs
all creation in her productions. Whether it be shocking
murders, or big beets, jail demolishers, expert horse thieves,
lynch justices, fat beeves, swimming horses, expounders of
new religions, tall corn, mammoth potatoes, ponderous cab-
bages, defunct Indians, secret societies, bright skies, mam-
moth pumpkins, Shanghai chickens, grizzlies, coyotes, dogs,
smart men, office seekers, coal holers, scrip, or fights .
she stands out in bold relief challenging competition.”

If such was the state of that sedate settlement so far
from the gold regions, what must-have been San Francisco,
where a fever for speculation raged, as the millions from
mines and gulches poured in there for export? Quickly
overcoming the slump that followed the first exodus to the
mines, real estate dealers, hotel keepers, tapsters, and out-
fitters waxed fat at their trades. Riotous living racked
the town and shooting frays made life precarious.

In the tumult, matters went from bad to worse until the
more sober elements were driven to form extra-legal asso-
ciations, known as Vigilance Committees, rough and ready
agencies which dealt out summary justice to the most in-

614 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

corrigible and brazen disturbers of the public peace, hang-
ing murderers and banishing ballot box stuffers. Under
the press of business, mistakes were sometimes made but,
on the whole, the work of the Committees was salutary—
at least until the organized police force was strong enough
and decent enough to function in a normal fashion.

The anarchy of the gold rush made still more impera-
tive the necessity, already appreciated by far-seeing citi-
zens, for a settled system of government; but when the
problem was presented to Congress, a vexatious delay en-
sued. At the moment a bitter quarrel over slavery was
occupying both houses, the planters wanting their peculiar
institution legalized in California and their opponents in-
sisting on freedom; the two factions were gripped in a po-
litical deadlock.

Seeing no immediate relief in the offing, the people
of California, with characteristic western initiative, took
matters into their own hands. Without any authority
from Washington, the territorial governor called for a
state convention, which was duly elected and met at Mon-
terey in 1849. Provided with a copy of the constitution of
Iowa by one of the delegates, the members at once entered
upon grave and decorous deliberations, offering to the peo-
ple at the close a fundamental law forbidding slavery and
involuntary servitude of any kind. Ina burst of enthusiasm
the proposed constitution was ratified by a huge majority
and California, with her document in hand, knocked at the
door of the Union, just in time to become involved in
the great debate which culminated in the Compromise of
1850 and to receive her statehood as a part of that impor-
tant settlement.

§

During the eventful years which sealed the fate of Cali-
fornia, a long conflict with Great Britain over the boundary
of the far northwest was brought to an end. In reality
this contest was merely the closing phase of a struggle

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 615

which had opened in colonial times. From the beginning
British merchants had relied upon the fur trade as an un-
failing source of profits; and in the protection of that inter-
est they had again and again brought influence to bear on
the policy of their government. ‘hey had been instru-
mental in securing the momentous decree of 1763 which
shut the gates of the hinterland to American squatters.

Defeated by the Revolution, they moved the seat of their
empire westward and, in the War of 1812, made the fur
trade once more an issue. On one thing both the English
and the Indians agreed: the fur-bearing animals of the
wilderness must be protected against the soil-tilling pio-
neers of the United States. But they were banded to-
gether in a fight against fate. [hough the second war for
American independence culminated in a peace that promised
a respite, it merely transferred to diplomacy the old battle
between resolute farmers and the British fur traders sup-
ported by Indian allies, and as the American frontier ad-
vanced, exterminating the fur-bearing animals, the clash of
these contending forces was pushed onward until it
reached the Pacific northwest. There at the water’s edge,
in the valley of the Columbia River where the British
Hudson’s Bay Company had its outpost, the long struggle
was fought to a finish.

For more than half a century that territory had been a
subject of negotiation among the powers of Europe. Spain,
Russia, and Great Britain all had historic pretensions to
ownership. Many an intrepid Spanish explorer had skirted
the coast line and reported discoveries. In their wake the
Russians had plowed the seas: the brave Vitus Behring,
acting under orders given by Peter the Great, had, in 1741,
sailed the cold and stormy waters that washed the Alaskan
shores and for nearly a hundred years afterward Russian
fur traders had steadily pushed their activities down along
the seaboard, taking their flag with them.

Still more formidable were the claims of Great Briain:
In 1777, Captain Cook, on the ill-fated voyage that finally

616 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

bore him to his death in the Sandwich Islands, had rounded
the Horn, sailed up the coast of North America, mapped
the shore line, and set precedents for those English geog-
raphers who wrote ‘‘New Albion” on their sketches of the
Columbia River Valley. Fifteen years later, Captain Van-
couver crept along where Cook had swiftly skirted and
outlined the contour of the coast with such care that his
charts served for many a decade as safe guides to the
mariner. Stirred by reports of the forerunners, British
fur traders from Canada, by sea and by land, now
descended upon the wilderness, planting posts far and wide
as they gathered up the rich peltries by trafic with the
Indians.

Not far behind was the ubiquitous Yankee. Indeed,
among Captain Cook’s men was a versatile and courageous
son of Connecticut, John Ledyard, who took his bearings
as he sailed along under the British flag and on his return
to Hartford brought out in 1783 a fascinating story of his
expedition, which was widely read in New England. The
Revolution had then come to a formal close; and
American merchants, emancipated from British dominance,
were ready to make the most of their freedom.

Lured by rumors of the profits reaped from the China
trade, Boston capitalists sent two ships to open up enter-
prise in the Far Pacific, receiving their reward, after three
anxious years of waiting, when their vessels, having com-
pleted a momentous voyage around the world, dropped
anchor safely in Massachusetts Bay. Emboldened by this
venture they dispatched other expeditions—one of which,
under Robert Gray, made extensive explorations on the
northwest coast in 1792, crossed the bar and sailed up the
mysterious ‘‘River of the West”’ to which he gave the name
of his ship, Columbia. ‘This river, in my opinion,” wrote
the captain’s mate, “‘would be a fine place for to set up a
factory.”

Sea paths being broken, the Americans then began to ex-
plore the northwest by land, President Jefferson setting a

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 617

bold precedent in 1803 by sending out the memorable
Lewis and Clark expedition, which made a perilous but tri-
umphant journey from St. Louis to the mouth of the Colum-
bia River and home again, bringing authentic descriptions
of the rivers, trails, climate, soil, products, flora, and fauna
of the intervening country and the distant coast. From
St. Louis American fur traders then began to press into the
new territory, exploring as they went and sending back
first-hand accounts of the most inaccessible regions until at
last the geography of the whole continent was outlined.
With an ever-watchful eye for new business, John Jacob
Astor of New York organized the American Fur Company,
built up a lucrative trade by land and sea, and in 1811
planted Fort Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia River.
By strong-willed initiative, therefore, British possession was
thus defied and a fine diplomatic issue raised. Un-
able to settle the boundary question easily, the United States
and England made a treaty in 1818 provading for joint
occupation of the contested territory during a period of ten
years—an arrangement later renewed for an indefinite term.

For a time it seemed as if the British had the better of
the bargain. Through the powerful Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany they gained most of the fur trade and pushed out their
operations in every direction. But appearances were decep-
tive. Before long the American settler with his plow was
pressing hard upon the wilderness exploited by the profit-
seeking trader, a development in which missionaries played
a leading role as pioneers. According to tradition four
Indians from the mountains made the long journey to St.
Louis to ask that preachers be sent to western tribes to
proclaim the gospel of Christ, giving a Macedonian call
which the Methodist Church answered by raising funds and
dispatching two ministers, Jason and Daniel Lee, with one
teacher, Cyrus Shepherd, to the Far West.

When they arrived on the coast, they received a cordial
welcome from Dr. McLoughlin, the generous chief of the
British trading post at Fort Vancouver, and on his excel-

618 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lent advice went into the Willamette Valley. In that gar-
den spot they built their first mission house, choosing as the
site a “broad, rich bottom, many miles in length, well-
watered, and supplied with timber, oak, fir, cottonwood,
white maple, and white ash scattered along the borders of
its grassy plains where hundreds of acres were ready for
the plough.’” Before many years elapsed the whole region
was penetrated by missionaries, both Catholic and Prot-
estant, among them the indefatigable Marcus Whitman
and his indomitable wife, Priscilla, whose names are indel-
ibly written in the records of Oregon.

Though the preachers of the gospel met many discour-
agements in the task of converting and “‘civilizing’’ the
natives, they waxed prosperous in the cultivation of the
fertile soil about their settlements, gradually diverting their
zeal, it seems, to the arts of colonization. In any event,
on discovering the economic advantages of the rich coun-
try in which they found themselves, they began to advertise
far and wide the merits of their new home, by means of
letters, circulars, books, and lectures. Aided by two clever
Massachusetts propagandists, Hall J. Kelley and Nathaniel
Wyeth, who had visited the northwest and grown wildly
enthusiastic about its ‘‘matchless climate’ and fertile soil,
the missionaries stirred the East by stories of great oppor-
tunities in Oregon.

In response, migratory persons, from the Atlantic sea-
board to the Mississippi Valley, veered toward the new
colony of the Willamette country. In 1839 a shipload of
settlers went out by the way of Cape Horn; four years later
the first large company made the overland journey from
Missouri; in a little while other pilgrims combined a land
and sea trip through Panama. ‘‘Did you come the Plains
over, the Isthmus across, or the Horn around?” ran the
query which greeted the new arrivals. Fed by three streams
of immigration, the tiny mission posts expanded into pros-
perous farming settlements—communities of hardy and in-
dustrious American citizens.

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 619

With unerring instinct the pioneers soon turned to a social
compact for self-government and self-protection, solemnly
drafting, in 1843, at a mass meeting held in a barn belong-
ing to the Methodist mission at Champoeg, a plan of pro-
visional government, modelled after the constitution of
Iowa. Rousseau had thus crossed the Rockies, or rather,
perhaps, the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers had descended
upon the distant community. ‘We, the people of the Ore-
gon territory,” ran the preamble to the compact, “‘for the
purposes of mutual protection and to secure peace and
prosperity among ourselves agree to adopt the following
laws and regulations until such time as the United States
of America extend their jurisdiction over us.”’

It was now clear that the affairs of Oregon were ap-
proaching a crisis. On their part, the British in the Far
West, observing the trend toward agricultural economy,
realized that the fur trade was doomed and that they could
only hold the Columbia Valley by following the American
example. ‘Their leading representative, Dr. McLoughlin,
the statesmanlike agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company,
though he had been cordial in his treatment of the Ameri-
can settlers, quickly grasped the inexorable, and made the
long journey to London to urge upon the British govern-
ment the adoption of a colonizing policy, but the aid which
he sought was not forthcoming. Defeated in his hopes
and plans, he resigned the leadership he had so honorably
held, letting the drift of western life pursue its own course.

Sniffing battle in the air, Britons and Americans in the
Oregon country opened the fray with skirmishes. Since
there was no established authority to make land grants and
keep order, they engaged in bitter contests over titles and
breaches of the peace, each side accusing the other of mak-
ing fraudulent entries, of selling firearms and whiskey to the
Indians, and undercutting in the fur market. Chafing
under the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson’s Bay Company
and desirous of bringing the whole region under their con-
trol, Englishmen on the ground begged their home gov-

620 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ernment in London to unite the Oregon country with Can-
ada and give it local autonomy. With equal force the pio-
neer Americans in Oregon, numbering over ten thousand
by 1846, urged the administration at Washington to settle
their troubled estate, give them self-government, and assure
them protection.

In the halls of Congress, echoes of the distant Oregon
controversy assumed many forms. ‘There were, of course,
some members of far vision who could see with the eye of
the imagination the rising empire of the West. For exam-
ple, in‘1820, two years after the treaty of British-American
occupation, a Senator from Virginia introduced a resolution
calling for an inquiry into the expediency of occupying the
Columbia River Valley, buttressing his plea with a powerful
argument furnished by that unquenchable Oregon enthusi-
ast, Hall J. Kelley. No tangible results flowed from this
effort. Again when the joint occupation term was renewed
indefinitely in 1828 the issue was once more raised in Con-
gress, where Senator Benton, that stalwart and picturesque
representative of Missouri, who had seen Asia from the
banks of the Mississippi, opposed the continuance of the
arrangement with all the strength he could command—and
that was tremendous—and insisted on a sweeping assertion
of American rights, including the definite establishment of
American sovereignty.

Though, as time passed, Benton’s advocacy kindled
the interest of an ever-wider circle, there were to the
very end men of little faith who confined their affections
to their own states and in some cases could hardly see be-
yond their neighboring counties. Of this school, Senator
McDuffie of South Carolina was the leading exponent.
‘What do we want with this territory?” he asked in the
Senate in 1843. With the assurance of an imperious wise-
man, he declared that a state as far away as Oregon could
not possibly live under the government of the Union. ‘To
talk about constructing a railroad to the western shore of
this continent,” he exclaimed, ‘‘manifests a wild spirit of

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 621

adventure which I never expected to hear broached in the
Senate of the United States.’” The wealth of the Indies,
he asserted, would not suffice to build it and for his climax
he drew a terrifying picture of almost insurmountable phys-
ical barriers of desert and mountain, clinching his argu-
ment with the impossible.

When at last, in spite of the pessimists, enough politi-
cians were rallied to the Oregon cause by the insistent call
for action, extremists sprang to the front and partisan
frenzy confounded deliberations. ‘We will have all the ter-
ritory up to the line of 54° 40’!” shouted the intransigent
Democrats, making ‘“‘Fifty-four forty or fight!” their popu-
lar slogan. By a clever stratagem they united the Oregon
and Texas issue in the campaign of 1844—declaring the
occupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas “‘the
burning issues’ of the hour. In all seriousness, they seemed
prepared to carry out the pledge of their slogan to the
letter if necessary. ‘‘It is not to be supposed that we shall
get out of this scrape,” roared Benton in the Senate, ‘‘with-
out seeing the match applied to the priming or having the
cup of dishonor held to our lips until we drink it to the
dregs.”

In a whirlwind campaign the Democrats carried the coun-
try while the alarmists held their breath. Was there to
be a war on two fronts, one against Great Britain and the
other against Mexico? The direful question was soon an-
swered by the triumphant Polk. Though, as we have seen,
he pursued with Mexico a policy which culminated in an
armed conflict, he became as mild as a cooing dove in his
negotiations with Great Britain over Oregon.. When he
was offered a compromise, a boundary line at the forty-
ninth parallel, he promptly consulted his party colleagues
in the Senate and closed the bargain in 1846. ‘The thunder-
ing of cannon was already reverberating along the Rio
Grande. While Texas and California were being won by
the sword, the great Oregon claim was reduced by diplo-
macy. War with Mexico being one thing and war with

‘622 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

England another, discretion conquered audacity, especially
as the southern planters had no vital interest in the exten-
sion of free soil.

Naturally the administration did not escape from this
adjustment without taunts from critics. ‘Texas and Ore-
gon were born the same instant,” snapped Senator Henne-
gan of Indiana, ‘‘nursed and cradled in the same cradle,
and they were at the same instant adopted by the democracy
throughout the land. There was not a moment’s hesita-
tion until Texas was admitted, but the moment she was
admitted, the peculiar friends of Texas turned and were
doing all they could to strangle Oregon! . . . We were
told that we must be careful not to involve ourselves in a
war with England on a question of disputed boundary.
There was a question of disputed boundary between us and
Mexico; but did we hear, from the same quarter, any warn-
ings about a collision with Mexico when we were about to
consummate the annexation of Texas?’ Senator Benton,
though a loyal Democrat of the Jackson school, agreed.
“Oh! mountain that was delivered of a mouse,” he sneered,
‘thy name shall be fifty-four forty.”

The best reply that could be made was framed by Cal-
houn, who, as Secretary of State, had pressed the annexa-
tion of Texas to a successful issue. Boldness in that direc-
tion, he said, was necessary to victory while caution was wise
in the case of Oregon. ‘“‘I believe,” he argued, ‘‘that pre-
cipitancy will lose you Oregon forever, no, not forever,
but it will lose you Oregon in the first struggle and it will
require another struggle hereafter when we become stronger
to regain it.”” ‘Thus the philosophy of the Oregon question
was formulated by the master logician of the planting inter-
est. In the end the English offer became the law of the
land, for the Senate, under southern leadership, ratified
the treaty of compromise. In 1859 a part of the Pacific
Northwest was admitted to the Union as the state of
Oregon. |

| §

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 623

On the long trail to Oregon and California was founded
in 1847, just after the conclusion of the irritating boundary
dispute, the Mormon colony at Salt Lake—in some respects
the most unique among the many strange settlements
planted on this continent. The religious sect which made
this excursion into the barren and forbidding wastes of the
Utah country had been established about fifteen years be-
fore, springing, according to legend, from heavenly reve-
lations made to Joseph Smith, of New York, discoverer and
translator of the ‘Book of Mormon.”

For a time its adherents wandered to and fro in the Mis-
sissippi Valley, suffering severely from the buffets of fate.
After stopping a while in Ohio, they journeyed far into
Missouri, where they met a hostility that turned them back
for a brief period on their westward march. Notwith-
standing their professions of peace, they were soon charged
with ‘“‘outrages” and accused of trying to erect a sectarian
“dominion.”

At any rate, the Mormons were set upon by their critics,
beaten and compelled to move across the Mississippi into
Illinois. ‘There misfortune continued to pursue them, the
New Canaan proving to be no more tranquil than the Old.
Their leader, Smith, was shot by a mob and they were all
threatened with extermination if they did not leave the
state. Now suspected of being committed to the theory
and practice of polygamy, they could see little possibility of
coming to terms with their Illinois neighbors. Consequently
many hailed with joy a proposal of the second prophet-
leader, Brigham Young, to migrate far beyond the reach of
civilization into the valleys of the Far West where they
hoped, as they read in the Bible, that the weary could be at
rest. :

In the spring of 1847 Young and a picked band of the
faithful went forth in search of the promised land. By
midsummer they reached the Salt Lake country, where they
pitched their tents and within two hours began to break the
tough soil with their plows. Soon they were joined by

624 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
a host that had been left behind, in all. fifteen hundred

strong, men, women, and children. Convinced that they
had found their final haven, the elders of the church dis-
patched missionaries to the eastern states, to England, Scot-
land, and the Continent of Europe to win converts and bring
back immigrants.

By way of support for this work a perpetual fund was
created and an economic argument was adroitly mingled
with the religious appeal. To poverty-stricken peasants and
struggling artisans of the Old World they offered security
and prosperity as well as the consolations of a new faith.
To polygamous men they promised wives in abundance; to
forlorn maids at least a share in a husband.

Within three years after the soil of the valley was first
turned, eleven thousand people were in the Salt Lake dis-
trict and the community which they called Deseret was
large enough to attract the attention of the federal goy-
ernment. In 1850, it was erected into the territory of
Utah under Clay’s last great compromise. ‘Though the
movement which produced such quick results was rightly
characterized by the historian, Katherine Coman, as ‘‘all in
all, the most successful example of regulated immigration
in American history,” it was accompanied by terrible hard-
ships and an appalling loss of life from hunger, drought,
disease, and snowstorms, among other calamities.

In no small measure the amazing outcome of the adven-
ture was due to the economic system directed by Brigham
Young. Tested by the widespread prosperity which it
eventually produced, in spite of all the difficulties, that
system was in most respects superior in results to the
methods adopted in any other American settlement organ-
ized on communal principles. In the early days of the
experiment, speculators and the commercial profiteers were
both restrained with an iron hand. Land was not sold at
first to settlers outright; but each family was allotted a
share—proportioned to its needs—to till for private profit
as long as it was thrifty and industrious. None was al-

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 625

lowed to accumulate a large estate and the industrious poor
were given advantages in competition with their richer
neighbors. ‘The purchase of supplies and the sale of
produce were carried on through a common store, while
irrigation works to provide water for the arid soil were
built by community action and service rights granted to
all families on equitable terms. Iron, woolen, printing,
and mining industries were managed also on the codpera-
tive principle, fair wages being paid and the profits going
into the common chest for the promotion of fresh under-
takings.

Although the whole system of economy was directed by
the Church fathers, apostles and elders, in theocratic
style under the severe regimen of President Young, al-
though many leaders managed to acquire goodly estates, the
central idea was general comfort, not the enrichment of
individuals—an idea pursued with keen discrimination, as
Young steered a steady course between the perils of com-
munism and the menace of disruptive individualism. While
the faithful were bound to strict obedience, there were no
wretched outcasts such as were to be found in every other
part of the civilized world. On one thing, all travelers
who visited the colony agreed, even when they denounced
“plural marriages’? in unmeasured terms, namely, that the
ancient and persistent enemy of mankind, undeserved pov-
erty, was nowhere to be seen.

Among the Mormons, temperance was proclaimed a vir-
tue, and before the Gentile invasion of Salt Lake, there were
no saloons, gambling houses, or brothels, Although
whiskey and beer were made in moderate quantities, there
was no drunkenness and little crime; strictly speaking, the
life of the community was marked by sobriety, frugality, and
industry; idlers who would not till the land allotted to them
were expelled from the colony without mercy, and the
same summary treatment was meted out to brawlers, topers,
and “godless persons” in general. ‘Those who walked in
the paths of labor and piety, according to Mormon tenets,

626 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

were commended publicly in Church; those who lapsed from
grace were warned, blacklisted, and, if necessary, banished.
In fact, a discipline of Puritan-like rigor held the entire
colony down to the hard and unremitting toil required to
win the victory over a barren and forbidding soil in an un-
favorable climate.

Whether internal dissensions would have finally broken
the economic unity of the Utah settlement is idle specula-
tion, for the Mormons had scarcely founded their settle-
ment when alien forces appeared to disturb their harmony.
The discovery of gold in California and the migration to
Oregon made Salt Lake a haven of rest and refuge for

the thousands of adventurers, travelers, and homeseekers
- who moved east and west over the long trail. If the sale
of foodstuffs and manufactured goods to these visitors
brought astounding profits to the Mormons, affording them
an immense capital for the extension of their economic
operations, the gains in riches were offset by losses in com-
munal solidarity. Lawless elements were introduced and
tares were sowed among the faithful. In the face of local
protests, Gentiles insisted on settling down in Utah to en-
gage in agriculture, merchandising, and industry, bringing
with them their customs and religious beliefs.

Then came federal intervention. On the organization
of Deseret into a regular territory in 1850 the supervision
of the national government followed as a matter of course
and in a very few months eventuated in an armed conflict,
spreading echoes of strange events in Utah all over the
continent. Charges of outlawry and murder, not always
groundless, were brought against the Mormons; President
Young himself was accused of instigating assassination;
polygamy, in its best light revolting enough to the national
mind, was portrayed in the most vivid language, horrifying
the public. Unavoidably, therefore, the Mormons and their
plural marriage became a national issue. ?

Taking account of the rising tide of opinion, the young
Republican party in its platform of 1856 called upon Con-

WESTWARD TO THE PACIFIC 627

gress to prohibit in the territories “those twin relics of bar-
barism, polygamy and slavery.”” And in the fulfillment of
their pledge, the Republicans included in the Morrill bill
of 1862 a provision designed to put an end to the peculiar
institution of Utah. Proving to be a dead letter in prac-
tice, this measure was succeeded by other acts of the same
tenor until, in the Edmunds bill of 1882 and the Edmunds-
Tucker law of 1887, a vital blow was struck at polygamy
by a threat to confiscate property.

By that time Mormon communities had spread over the
West from Iowa to California; the church, controlled by
a small body of officials, had grown rich; individuals had
amassed fortunes; the original communal economy had
practically dissolved; and the Latter Day Saints, as the
Mormons were now known, while still professing the creed
of their fathers, had become as worldly-minded as the
descendants of the Puritans. Monuments to their enter-
prise still stood in their Temple and Tabernacle, in their
good roads, irrigation works, and industries. And scat-
tered over the world from Hawaii to Scandinavia were
congregations of Mormons who looked to Salt Lake City
as the Rome of the new dispensation, the eternal home of
the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” But
the pentecostal fervor of the early days and the serene
assurance of Brigham Young’s faith were hardly more vis-
ible in Utah than were the enthusiasm and somber reso-
lution of Bradford and Carver in contemporary Plymouth.

- ‘ a* ¢ a %
AA Yuh Wh Rat hah a

Si ne

CHAPTER XIV

The Sweep of Economic Forces

r “QHE expansion of the United States to the Pacific—
the acquisition of a vast territory adapted to plant-
ing in the South and to farming in the North—

seemed to assure the indefinite predominance of the agri-

cultural interest, the main support of Jeffersonian democ-
racy as rededicated by Andrew Jackson. Indeed, for three
decades after the overthrow of John Quincy Adams, in

1828, the events of American politics appeared to confirm

the faith of those who upheld the banner of Jefferson and

Jackson in a war on Hamilton’s system of economy.

During these years, the Democratic party won all the
presidential elections save two and the exceptions were his-
torical accidents rather than direct defeats on questions of
policy. On those two occasions the Whigs, who carried the
day, nominated military heroes, made no declaration of
principles, framed no platform, and swept the polls in the
smoke and confusion of a general uproar. Had they defi-
nitely confronted the country with a clear-cut program in-
cluding the bank, the protective tariff, ship subsidies, and

628

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 629

the assumption of debts repudiated by states, it is doubt-
ful whether they could have stampeded the voters into
electing either of their martial statesmen.

While the Whigs were trying to capture the Gadel of
political power, under the cover of noise and evasion, the
Democratic leaders worked toward a more and more spe-
cific definition of doctrines, making their appeal to the
planting and farming classes more and more precise. In
their platform of 1840 they wrote their dogmas in lan-
guage so plain that the most simple-minded pioneer or
mechanic could understand it. They declared their inflex-
ible opposition to the tariff, a public debt, the bank, internal
improvements, and all interference with the domestic insti-
tutions of the states—the labor supply of the planters. At
every presidential election until the fateful campaign of
1860, Democrats reiterated this economic creed as their
unchanging profession of faith.

In no official statements did they make any attempt to
conceal the essential character of the conflict. On the con-
trary, their victorious candidates on the hustings and in state
papers frankly and specifically named the place and the
weapons. In any one of a sheaf of documents, the canoni-
cal articles could be found. For example, in a message to
Congress in December, 1848, a message solemnly record-
ing the views of his party, President Polk enumerated the
regular devices of the Federalists and the Whigs against
which the Democratic organization was arrayed—the bank,
protective tariffs, the debt, internal improvements, and the
recent project for the distribution of public lands among the
states—scornfully referring to the “popular names and
plausible arguments’ employed by their champions in de-
fense and justification. Then, in official form, he branded
them all as schemes principally and deliberately contrived to
transfer money “from the pockets of the people to the
favored classes” and revealing a tendency ‘‘to build up an
aristocracy of wealth, to control the masses of society, and
monopolize the political power of the country.”

630 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

The Whigs’ victory in the presidential election of that
year really meant no triumph for the party of Hamilton
and Webster. Their candidate, General Taylor, a Lou-
isiana planter and hero of the Mexican war, had no posi-
tive ideas on politics whatever; and in their appeal to the
voters they deliberately avoided making any statement of
principles at all. Hence, by electing Taylor they won no
popular indorsement of their economic program. And this
was their last victory—at all events, under the name which
they had long utilized in conjuring the voters.

When the Whigs resorted to the same tactics again in
1852 under the leadership of Winfield S. Scott, also a gen-
eral in the Mexican War, they were utterly discomfited; for
the Democrats, besides distinctly avowing théir agricultural
program, gave the opposition a dose of its own medicine by
also selecting as a standard bearer a man of Mars, Gen-
eral Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. In the campaign
that followed the Whigs were simply routed, the Demo-
crats sweeping every state in the Union except Massachu-
setts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. If the count-
ing of heads meant anything, the party of Alexander Hamil-
ton, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster was dead and buried
under an avalanche of public contempt.

At all events, with a grand air of assurance, Pierce an-
nounced that the general principle of tariff for revenue only
could now be regarded as “the settled policy of the coun-
try.”” With equal confidence, the new President relieved
the planting members of his party on the point of their
labor system, waving aside with a disdainful flourish the
agitators who tried to foment trouble “‘in the supposed in-
terests of the relatively few Africans in the United States.”
The stars in the heavens were fixed. The American politi-
cal system was rigid. At least so things appeared to the
President of the United States in 1853, only ten years be-
fore the emancipation of the slaves.

§

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 631

Such assurance would doubtless have been justified if
the American social order had been as unchanging as the »
structure of feudalism in the Middle Ages, but it happened
to be at that moment the most dynamic society in the world.
While it is true England was then gathering the fruits of
triumphant industry and continental states were conva-
lescing from the violent upheaval of 1848, in none of those
countries was agriculture as well as manufacturing under-
going a swift and radical transformation.

In the United States nothing was static—not even the
sacred and immutable Constitution. Inventors were altering
the face of the earth and the sea; builders of factories and
railroads were striding forward in seven league boots fol-
lowed by their swelling army of industrial workers; steam-
ships were beginning to drive sailing vessels from the deep;
and packages of securities in strong boxes were growing
bulkier day by day. Even the agricultural scene was chang-
ing, for the frontier was pushing westward as the economy
of capitalism moved into the Ohio Valley, that stronghold
of Jacksonian Democracy. From the Far West, California
was pouring her golden stream into the national treasury,
adding to the working capital of the nation. Moreover,
the planting system, which in older days seemed to have a
stability akin to that of the feudal order, was being turned
upside down by the development of the cotton gin—under-
going a revolution scarcely less fundamental than that which
had overtaken the handicrafts on the introduction of steam
and machinery. Inevitably the intellectual life of the coun-
try was being stirred by fresh currents of inquiry and criti-
cism, ranging from the Mormonism of Joseph Smith,
through the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson to
the socialism of Horace Greeley. New England’s
dominant ideas were now as far from the mystic assump-
tions of Cotton Mather as the steam-driven spinning mill
from the one-spindle wheel of Priscilla.

The history of technology, so vast and so vital, increas-
ing in significance every year, belongs obviously to special-

632 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ists in physics and chemistry. It cannot yet be written be-
cause the materials have not been assembled. ‘The history
of business likewise remains obscure because those who fol-
low in the footsteps of Gibbon and Carlyle are prone to
give more attention to the titled ruler of a little prin-
cipality or the petty politician of Buncombe county than
to the great captain of industry who takes the whole world
for his realm. And as for the labor leaders of the middle
period, marshaling their militant hosts, it is only necessary
to note that the first comprehensive account of the Ameri-
can trade union movement came from the press in the sec-
ond decade of the twentieth century. To this very hour,
the marvelous development of American agriculture awaits
the maker of its mighty sagas. Finally, psychology con-
centrating on the mind and its behavior has not yet explored
the processes by which sentiment is woven in and out
through the fabric of economy.

For these and other reasons the politician has continued
to occupy the center of the historical stage, in spite of the
fact that he is the shadow rather than the substance of
things. Moreover, his proportions have been curiously
distorted in the mirror of recorded legend by the contin-
gencies of fate. The storm of the Civil War, the revolution
wrought by the abolition of slavery, and the passions
aroused by the conflict made it impossible for those who
wrote immediately after the red years had passed to observe
the ‘‘fabulous forties” and the “fitful fifties’’ in a clear per-
spective through the murky gloom. When at last the cloud
lifts, when the fundamental course of American civilization
is seen in a long, unbroken development, when the sharp
curves of years are smoothed by the reckoning of centuries,
then if all signs do not fail the middle period of American
history will appear as the most changeful, most creative,
most spirited epoch between the founding of the colonies
and the end of the nineteenth century, The Civil War
itself, called in these pages the “Second American Revolu-
tion,” was merely the culmination of the deep-running trans-

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 633

formation that shifted the center of gravity in American
society between the inauguration of Jackson and the elec-
tion of Lincoln.

On the material side, the leaders of this transformation
were the inventors and the business men who, then as al-
ways, were bent on immediate ends and took little thought
about the distant fruition of their labors. To the vast
array of machines which revolutionized all industry, the
United States furnished more than its quota during the
Victorian age. Heavy borrowings, of course, were made
from England—the steam engine of Watt, the locomotive
of Stephenson, and the spinning machinery of Arkwright
and Crompton—but in every case American inventors
added to the contrivances they appropriated. Fulton put
the steam engine into a ship and opened a new era of navi-
gation; Howe created the sewing machine; McCormick and
Hussey by giving the reaper to the farmer made obsolete
at one blow the sickle and scythe that had come down from
days beyond Tut-ankhamen; Morse, with his telegraph,
spanned the continent, bringing around one table the busi-
ness transactions of a whole nation; Whitney’s cotton gin
smashed an old economy created in the childhood of the
race—challenging the spinners at their wheels in New Eng-
land and the cotton planters with their armies of slaves far
away under the burning sun of Mississippi and Louisiana.

For every inventor there stood a captain of industry
ready to snatch the machine from the workshop, collect the
capital to put it in motion, organize the labor forces neces-
sary to production, and seek out the markets for the stream
of goods that flowed from its whirling wheels. In every
respect, the nature of American society in the North
favored the enterprise of business men. No intrenched
clergy or nobility overshadowed them in national life or
branded their labors, as through all the long past, with
the stamp of contempt.

Available for every kind of manufactures were unparal-
leled natural resources—timber, coal, iron, lead, and cop-

634 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

per—to be had in many cases from a friendly government
almost for the asking, if indeed that courtesy was made
necessary by the easy ethics of the hour and place. Supple-
menting the sons and daughters of American farmers was
an ever-growing supply of stalwart European laborers from
which to draw recruits for mills, mines, and industrial un-
dertakings of all grades and types.

Nor was capital wanting. As the flood of American
grain, cotton, and gold rolled into the Old World, Ameri-
can credit was raised abroad. English and Continental in-
vestors, though often pinched by the chicanery of Ameri-
can communities, were eager to lend money at a higher
rate of interest than they could get at home. Finally, the
American manufacturer had an immense domestic market
at his command; even when the Democrats managed to cut
the tariff down to the lowest point, the barrier of the sea
and the knowledge of the terrain gave him a distinct
advantage over his English competitors.

In these circumstances American business men rose exu-
berantly to their opportunities, showing themselves in tal-
ents and initiative not one whit behind their British
brethren. Beyond cavil, the Abbots, Lawrences, Astors,
Browns, Forbeses, Vanderbilts, and Brookses of American
enterprise conceived and executed economic undertakings
of such magnitude and gathered in profits so princely as to
earn a just place among the heroes celebrated by that Plu-
tarch of English capitalism, Samuel Smiles. They were all
flesh and blood men, keenly alive to every advantage, active
in promoting their political interests, and as determined in
their modes as the planters were in theirs.

By the middle of the century they were ready in num-
bers, in wealth, and in political acumen to meet in the arena
of law or war the stanchest spokesmen of the planting
aristocracy. For every southern master commanding an
army of bondmen in the field, there was now a northern
captain of steam and steel.surrounded by legions of work-
ing people. If many a planter could boast of a thousand

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 635

slaves, many a captain of industry could pride himself on
his thousand free laborers. On down the scale ran paral-
lel the structures of the two economies, ending at the petty
boss with two or three apprentices and the master with two
or three slaves. When the Civil War came, the planting
group of the South, high and low, could show an enrollment
of 350,000 slave owners, large and small; in 1866 the
treasury records of the federal government reported
460,000 persons, mainly in the North, paying income taxes.
Both groups were ably led, well informed about the proc-
esses of government, and equally alive to the protection of
their interests as they conceived them. One great difference
was discernible, however: the planters frequently sent mem-
bers of their own order to Congress to represent them,
whereas the captains of industry relied mainly on lawyers to
speak for them in the legislative chambers.

By an inexorable process beyond the will of any man or
group, the sovereignty of King Cotton and the authority
of his politicians were rudely shaken, the rapidity of the
operation being recorded in ledgers and carefully set forth
by the census. In the decade preceding Lincoln’s election,
the output of domestic manufactures, including mines and
fisheries, almost doubled in value while the output of south-
ern staples showed an increase of less than twenty-five per
cent—a fact more portentous than all the oratory in Con-
gress. In 1859 the domestic manufactures just enumerated
yielded a return of $1,900,000,000 while the naval stores,
rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco of the South offered only
a total of $204,000,o00—a fact more ominous than Gar-
rison’s abolition. When Lincoln was inaugurated, the
capital invested in industries, railways, commerce, and city
property exceeded in dollars and cents the value of all the
farms and plantations between the Atlantic and the Pacific
—a fact announcing at last the triumph of industry over
agriculture. The iron, boots, shoes, and leather goods that
poured annually from the northern mills alone surpassed in
selling price all the cotton grown in southern fields.

636 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

And the drift could not be reversed: the acreage of land
available for farms and plantations was fixed by nature
while the amount of capital that could be accumulated, the
variety of machines that could be invented, and the number
of people who could be sustained by manufacturing had no
limits discernible to the human mind. By the middle of
the century, the balance of power in the United States had
already been shifted and every year saw the center of
gravity advanced still further in the new direction. King
Cotton had lost his scepter and nothing but a severe jar
was necessary to overturn his throne. ‘The supreme ques-
tion to be debated, if contemporaries had only known it,
was whether the political revolution foreshadowed by the
economic flux was to proceed peacefully or by violence.

§

No less significant in releasing dynamic forces and chang-
ing the direction of social currents was the rapid develop-
ment of new means of communication, especially to the
northwest. In whole sectors of the frontier transporta-
tion facilities now destroyed the economic basis of Jack-
sonian Democracy with its political and cultural reflexes.
The revolution in this sphere began in 1807 with the suc-
cessful trip of Fulton’s little Clermont up the Hudson.
Within four years there were steamboats on the Mississippi,
inaugurating the age of thrilling adventure made epic by
Mark Twain. The races, explosions, comedies, and trag-
edies of the mighty waterway, while they furnish color for
the drama, were not the essence of the story, however.
More fundamental was the prosaic fact that cargoes could
now be carried up stream and to the eastern markets as
well as to New Orleans.

A second stage in the evolution of transportation came
with the construction of grand trunk canals. ‘Two of these,
the Erie opened in 1825 and the Pennsylvania system com-
pleted nine years later, linked the West with the eastern

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 637
seaboard—with New York City and Philadelphia. Then

followed swiftly the commencement of the third and still
more revolutionary era; the banks of the new waterways
were hardly carpeted with grass when they were sprinkled
with the soot of locomotives. It was in 1828 that the
ground was broken for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway,
with great ceremony.

Within a decade or two, the chief cities of the coast were
united by short lines; and railway promoters, with a keen
eye upon the future, were reaching out along the trunk
canals to the Mississippi Valley. By 1860 the Baltimore
and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central
systems had tapped the stronghold of Jacksonian Democ-
racy. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, and
Cleveland by that date were brought within a distance from
the Atlantic that could be measured in hours instead of in
days. [he stream of migration westward became a tor-
rent; in return the stream of wheat, corn, and bacon from
the farms became an avalanche.

The economic results flowing from this network of trans-
portation were startling in range and intensity. With the
swift expansion of the national market, textile mills in New
England roared louder, blast furnaces in Pennsylvania
flamed higher. As their crops multiplied and their land
values increased, farmers of the old Northwest gathered
in the increment, invested in government bonds and railway
stocks, moved to neighboring county seats, started local
banks, and passed out of the physical and moral atmosphere
of the backwoods to other cultural circumstances. All over
the Middle West, crossroads hamlets grew into trading
towns, villages spread out into cities, cities became railway
and industrial centers.

By 1860, the wide-scattered ganglia of the,new economic
system were well established: Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleve-
land, Sandusky, Columbus, Indianapolis, Madison, Terre
Haute, St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee were the scenes
of lively business enterprise. Cincinnati was the pork-

638 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

packing, clothing, and wine metropolis of the Ohio Valley.
“TI heard,” wrote a visitor of that far-off time, ‘‘the crack
of the cattle driver’s whip and the hum of the factory: The
West and the East meeting.”” Of the two thousand woolen
mills recorded in the census of the year in which Lincoln
was first elected President, one-fourth were in the western
states. At the Republican national convention in Chicago,
which nominated him, growers and carders of wool from
Ohio and Indiana joined the spinners of New England and
iron masters of Pennsylvania in cheering for the protective
tariff plank. By 1860 the output of the grist mills, fed
largely from the fields of the North and West, was almost
equal in value to the whole annual crop of King Cotton.

In the presence of such indubitable and dynamic facts,
the theories of Jacksonian Democracy lost some of their
appeal—at least to the higher beneficiaries of the new
order, As quick transportation carried farm produce to
eastern markets and brought ready cash in return, as rail-
ways, increasing population, and good roads lifted land
values, brick and frame houses began to supplant log cabins;
with deep political significance did prosperity tend to stifle
the passion for ‘‘easy money” and allay the ancient hatred
for banks. At last beyond the mountains the chants of suc-
cessful farmers were heard above the laments of poor
whites, the equality of the primeval forest and stumpy
field passing away forever, taking with it the psychological
fringe.

Railroad lawyers now mingled in state legislatures
with men in homespun from the farms, the great Lin-
coln himself serving as an efficient representative of the
Illinois Central directors at Springfield. Well-groomed
preachers damped the fires of Peter Cartwright’s hell;
while ladies formerly garbed in linsey-woolseys put on al-
pacas and silks, read Godey’s Lady’s Book on the fashions,
and improved their grammar. From log academies the
‘Hoosier Schoolmaster”’ retired into the darker places of
the backwoods, as teachers of the classics arrived on the

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 639

banks of the Wabash and dancing masters came to intro-
duce the manners of the ballroom—for a consideration.

In the sweep of things the old Northwest Territory was
assimilated more and more to the economy and culture of
the Northeast, the two sections drawing closer together
every day in bands of steel and gold. By the railroads
the trade and the interests of the upper Mississippi Valley
were turned away from New Orleans to New York, Phila-
delphia, and the Atlantic seaboard generally. At the mid-
dle of the century an eminent southern economist com-
plained, with full warrant, that “the great cities of the
North have severally penetrated the interior with artificial
lines until they have taken from the open and untaxed cur-
rent of the Mississippi the commerce produced on its bor-
ders. . . . The Illinois canal has not only swept the whole
produce along the line of the Illinois River to the East,
but it is drawing the products of the Upper Mississippi
through the same channel, thus depriving not only New
Orleans but St. Louis of a rich portion of their trade.”

To the mechanics of easy transportation, eastern capital-
ists added credit devices, advancing good bank notes of
conservative eastern institutions to western operators on the
security offered by commodities to be shipped to seaboard
markets. ‘These moneyed facilities,” lamented the same
southern writer, ‘enable the packer, miller, and speculator
to hold on to their produce until the opening of navigation
in the spring, and they are no longer obliged, as formerly,
to hurry off their shipments during the winter, by way of
New Orleans, in order to realize funds by drafts on their
shipments. ‘The banking facilities of the East are doing as
much to draw trade from us as the canals and railways
which eastern capital is constructing.’ Thus planters who
needed cheap corn and bacon for their slaves as well as
political support from the Northwest found invincible com-
petitors in eastern capitalists who, besides offering expan-
sive credits and easy shipping facilities to the farmers,
helped to make over the frontier in the image of great

640 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

industry. It was all plain as day to southern statesmen,
but no effort of will and imagination could overcome the
flow of fortune. The economic basis was being laid for a
new partisan adjustment—and in 1860 spinning fates
wrought the patterns.

§

With the multiplication of manufacturing establishments
and railways came another natural consequence: the rapid
growth of a working class separated from the soil and con-
gested in the cities. With every census the industrial army
loomed larger on the horizon. In 1860, it was written
down by the census taker that one-third of the entire popu-
lation of the country was sustained by “manufacturing in-
dustry” and that the white population dependent upon daily
wages for a livelihood, upon what Jefferson called the
‘“‘caprices and casualties of trade,” far exceeded the num-
ber of slaves laboring on the estates of King Cotton. And
the rate of increase foretold in measured strokes the ulti-
mate shift of the social base with riches from the country
to the city.

Meanwhile the ranks of the working class were being
transformed by new racial infusions—the supply of labor
from the farms, men, women, and children of native stock,
steadily augmented by a swelling stream of immigrants.
As the Nordic planter of the South, in his passionate quest
for wealth, was willing to submerge his own kind in a flood
of Negroes from the wilds of Africa, so the Nordic mill
owner of New England, with his mind on dividends, took
little thought about the nationality or color of those who
stood patiently at his spindles and looms or huddled into
the tenements of his cities. A time was to come when the
greatest industry in the land of John Alden and Cotton
Mather was to be directed by a Portuguese Jew with an
Anglo-Saxon name; when Governor Winthrop’s Puritan
capital was to be ruled by an Irish Catholic mayor. Under

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 641

the stimulus of feverish profit-making, the gates of the land
were flung open to the peoples of the earth and it seemed
highly moral to write over the portals the fine humane
phrase: ‘‘Asylum for the Oppressed of Every Land.”

America’s inducements were made all the more alluring
to immigrants by the conditions of labor in the Old World
at the middle of the century. In those decades, the artisans
of England seemed to be sinking into hopeless poverty; on
any reckoning the terrible picture of their state drawn by
the sharp pen of Friedrich Engels in 1844 was accurate.
The truth of this awful indictment was borne out by the
chartist movement, which threatened the English ruling
classes with a revolution of violence, and by the eagerness
of skilled mechanics to escape from their native land to the
United States.

In worse distress, no doubt, were the peasants of Ire-
land, groaning beneath the burden of absentee landowners.
Celtic in race and Catholic in religion, they had for centuries
chafed under the dominion of London. Forced to pay rents
to English lords, contribute tithes to the English Church in
Ireland, and obey laws made by the English Parliament in
which they had a minority of members, the Irish thought
their wrongs too heavy for human endurance. Then as a
climax came the potato famine, adding torment to despair.
Hundreds perished of starvation; travelers along the high-
ways reported that unburied dead lay where they fell, with
their mouths stained green by weeds and thistles eaten for
nourishment in their last extremity.

Literally driven from home by starvation, the peasants
of Ireland swarmed to America. Within two decades, more
than one-half the laboring population of that unhappy coun-
try was carried across the Atlantic and incorporated into the
social and political order of the United States. When the
federal government took its first census of the foreign born
in 1850, it found nearly a million Irish among them—in
ratios, forty-two per cent of the total; and, within ten years,
more than half a million new immigrants from Ireland were

642 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

added to this brigade of industrial recruits. Coming with-
out capital, often with nothing better than rags on their
backs, they flocked to the factories of the urban centers or
joined the gangs of workmen busy on the canals, railways,
and other structures that marked the rise of American capi-
talism. If, in virtue of their economic status or their agri-
cultural inheritance, they generally joined the party that
waged war on Hamilton’s system, they contributed none the
less to the fortunes of those who were soon to lay Jeffer-
son’s planters low in the dust and multiply the demand for
industrial labor.

During the same period, conditions similar to those pre-
vailing in Ireland sent a flood of German immigrants to seek
their fortunes in the New World. The blight that blasted
the potato crops of Ireland likewise visited the Rhine Val-
ley and sections of southern Germany, leaving in its wake
misery equally galling if less widely extended. ‘To this
economic affliction was added political discontent. Though
German peasants and laborers were not ruled by an alien
race, they had in general no more voice in their government
than did the Irish; and with a kindred zeal they united
under bourgeois leaders in a national democratic move-
ment.

Taking advantage of the furor unchained by the
French revolution of 1848, German radicals made heroic
efforts to cast off the despotic rule of kings and princes by
agitations and uprisings. At first success attended their
revolts, only to be followed by a fierce reaction in which
severe penalties were inflicted upon the defeated champions
of liberty. To these victims of poverty and politics, Amer-
ica was indeed an asylum. In 1847 over fifty thousand
Germans entered the United States; during the decade fol-
lowing 1850 they came at the rate of ninety thousand a
year; and when the United States was to be tried by fire
near the middle of the century over a million Germans were
among the foreign born, some living in the towns as me-
chanics and merchants, others as farmers in the interior—

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 643

even far and wide on the frontiers of Wisconsin and
Minnesota.

Another important element in the changing economic and
social order of the middle period was the women who
flocked from the native homesteads and from the immigrant
ships to the mills, offices, schoolrooms, and stores. (Women
had laid the foundations of the textile business in colonial
America; at their wheels and looms they had nourished it
throughout the handicraft age. When at length the steam
engine drew the industry away from firesides to factories,
they naturally followed it, their labor remaining the
basis of that industry. Of the six thousand persons em-
ployed in the cotton mills of Lowell in 1836, nearly five
thousand were, according to a French visitor, “young
women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the
daughters of farmers from the different New England
states.”

Indeed, in all except the heavier metal industries, women
were an essential factor; by the middle of the century more
than a hundred trades were employing them and they were
also to be found behind the counters in great mercantile
establishments. And as they streamed from their homes
the rigid domestic system inherited from the colonial age
began to crumble. The theory, the law, and the politics of
the facts soon reflected the economics. It was no accident
that ‘‘the women’s rights movement” rose among the maids
and matrons of the industrial North with its relative
independence for those who labored, rather than in shel-
tered mansions on southern plantations where ladies still
bowed to the economic and social institutions of their grand-
mothers.

§

Like every other class in history called forth by economic
processes, the new industrial workers of America, as their
numbers mounted, began to draw together in associations
and evolve ideas of defense and aggression. Even before

644 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the beginning of the transformation in society brought
about by steam and machinery, artisans in many staple
crafts had formed local societies and started cam-
paigns for higher wages, shorter hours, and milder legisla-
tion. In all the important towns of the young republic,
such unions had appeared. While Washington was still
President, the shoemakers of Philadelphia established a
trade society and in 1799 they struck against their employ-
ers, thus serving on the nineteenth century notice of events
to come.

Startled by the growing power of their workmen, masters
resorted to the courts, attempting through indictments and
prosecution to dissolve the aligning forces that loomed
before them. But they could not stay by judicial decrees the
movement of consolidation. By the time Jackson and his
conquering hosts swept into the White House, artisans of
the standard crafts in every large industrial town were
organized in unions and in each leading business center
existed a federation of these “‘locals” for codperative action.
In 1836 there were fifty-three unions in Philadelphia,
fifty-two in New York, twenty-three in Baltimore, and six-
teen in Boston; among women workers as among men the
beginnings of association had appeared, especie in the
textile industry. |

When once the labor groups of various localities had
become well organized, a national federation seemed the
logical next step. Indeed, the course of American economy
required it, if efforts to control wages and other labor con-
ditions were to be successful; for the rapid rise of manu-
facturing cities in the Middle West and the constant migra-
tion of labor from town to town made cooperation over
the whole area vital to effective action anywhere. Mean-
while the development of the steamboat and railway, reduc-
ing the cost of traveling, rendered centralization on a large
scale apparently feasible. Believing that the time was ripe,
labor leaders attempted in 1834 to bring about a solidarity
among workers of every craft and grade at a general con-

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 645

vention of delegates of local unions held in New York ‘‘to
unite and harmonize the efforts of all the productive classes
of the country.” ‘Though auspiciously begun, the tentative
federation formed at this conference just managed to
stumble along for three years, meeting disaster in the panic
of 1837. The foundations for a national structure were
not yet properly laid.

Quick to catch the import of this failure, leaders in the
most powerful trades set about the more business-like enter-
prise of consolidating for national action the local unions
already formed in each of the great industries. So while
Clay and Webster and Calhoun were arguing political ques-
tions in the Senate, obscure workers were traveling up and
down the country in the interest of their crafts, welding the
various local societies into separate national federations.
Before the titanic social war broke in upon the peace of
the land in 1861, printers, machinists, iron molders, stone
cutters, hat finishers, and other special groups were well
organized in the industrial cities and more or less effec-
tively federated on the national stage. If it had not been
for the multitudes of foreign immigrants, the constant drift
of mechanics to the cheap lands of the frontier, and the pos-
session of the ballot by practically all native and naturalized
workingmen, the American labor movement of the mid-
century would probably have matured in a national form as
early as that of England. Even so, American trade union-
ists during the forties were more powerful in their influence
on the course of domestic politics and legislation than were
the disfranchised and uneducated laborers of the English
mill towns.

Moreover, there was hardly a phase of the European
labor agitation that was not duplicated in this country
during the period. There were strikes and demonstrations,
far-reaching, prolonged and repeated, never more volcanic
in character than in the decade that preceded the Civil War.
With the ebbing and flowing of strikes, surged a torrent of
revolutionary theories that fired the imagination of working

646 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

people and colored the thoughts of journalists and philoso-
phers no less potent than Horace Greeley, Charles A.
Dana, George William Curtis, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Margaret Fuller, and James Russell Lowell.

Especially did utopian socialism make a deep impression
on the mind of the age. Profoundly moved by the poverty of
industrial centers, intellectuals with tender sympathies freely
declared that the solution of the problem of misery in the.
United States as in Europe lay in either communism or in
phalansteries combining agriculture and industry. The way
being prepared by native criticism, the teachings of French
dreamers, particularly St. Simon and Fourier, were accepted
with enthusiasm. No less hearty was the welcome given to
the gospel of the British socialist, Robert Owen. Indeed, in
more than one respect Owen belonged to the United States
too; if he made a great social experiment at New Lanark in
Scotland, he also established a communal colony at New
Harmony in Indiana; if he appealed to the governing
classes of Europe, he likewise addressed the House of Rep-
resentatives in the United States with the same fervor; his
New Moral World was read in Pittsburgh and Indianapolis
as well as in London and Manchester. |

Throughout the middle period, certainly after 1825, rad-
ical beliefs kept the industrial section of America in constant
turmoil. Innumerable labor journals, some dedicated to
political agitation, some to the promotion of labor solidarity
and unionism, were issued under the direction of able edi-
tors and exerted a strong influence in working-class districts.
Long before the close .of Jackson’s first administration in
1833, there was in full blast a labor press that compelled
governing persons and artisans alike to give heed to new
voices. Moreover, after repeated calls for independent
political action, signs of revolt against party machines had
become unmistakable in the cities of New England and of
the middle states, with the nomination of labor candidates
for local offices in many centers and their election in some
instances. ‘‘The balance of power has at length got into

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 647

the hands of the working people where it properly belongs,”
declared a reformist paper of Philadelphia in 1829. Pre-
mature as was this rejoicing, it took a good deal of skillful
maneuvering on the part of regular politicians to quell the
uprising; and in the operation the bulk of social legislation
piled up in state capitals. Imprisonment for debt was
abolished, the beginnings of free popular education were
made, and laws safeguarding the life and health of workers
in the factories were enacted.

Keen observers of the time, especially from the planting
section, watching this turbulent current in the North, were
moved to exclaim that the structure of industrial society
was in imminent danger of dissolution, menaced by the rising
tide of radicalism. ‘Do socialism and agrarianism and
Fanny Wrightism find foothold at the North and threaten
the destruction of private property and endanger private
rights?” inquired an Alabama Congressman in 1858. ‘The
answer was inherent in the question: “‘At the South every
man is secure from mobocratic misrule.”” Though no doubt
there was a high pitch of excitement in such notes, a growing
discontent in industrial districts did in fact offer burning
issues to statesmen, economists, and manufacturers; if they
had not exercised discretion and if the Civil War had not
intervened, the labor movement might have taxed their
powers of negotiation long before Samuel Gompers and
Eugene V. Debs entered the arena.

But they had at their command the experience of the past.
More than once in the history of humanity, popular dis-
tempers of revolutionary vehemence had been allayed, tem-
porarily at least, by the confiscation and distribution of
property. This had occurred in the plebeian uprisings of
Rome, the peasants’ revolts of western Europe, and the
French Revolution of the eighteenth century. It was to
occur again—in America, under another guise. The prop-
erty that was now to be seized and tossed to the disinherited
was not that of patricians, earls, marquises, or bishops. It
belonged in law to the whole people of the United States

648 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and was held in trust for them by the federal government.
It was the public domain of the West.

The disposition of that land in the form of a general
largesse was, of course, not an idea created for the occasion.
Jefferson had proposed to use the public domain for the
purpose of building up a nation of free farmers, in his
opinion the only enduring basis of a republic; and, before
Jefferson died, Benton of Missouri had started to advocate
a policy of free distribution. Politicians and speculators in
the vanguard had been keeping their eyes on it for more
than a generation. But a widespread propaganda in favor
of relieving the poverty and discontent of the industrial East
by giving away land in the West was a new emphasis in
American affairs, producing a profound effect on the public
mind. It touched all the radical labor leaders and brought
even communists, such as Weitling, under the spell of an
agrarian gospel. It appealed to the German immigrants
who came in such throngs in the fifties. It crept up into the
middle class of native Americans. Horace Greeley, who
thought he had found a solution of the industrial problem,
in a kind of socialism, added the Homestead article to his
profession of faith.

In this economic situation, so peculiar to American life,
lay at least a partial explanation of the developments that
took place in the labor movement of the middle period.
Energies which in the normal course of affairs would have
been devoted to building up trade unions and framing
schemes of social revolution were diverted to agitation in
favor of a free farm for every workingman whether he
wanted it or not. A Homestead Act, ran the argument,
would emancipate him from the iron law of misery; it
would enable him either to go West and take up an estate
or, as the price of staying home, to demand higher wages
from his industrial employer. Thus, in the literature of the
great social debate land reform assumed a radical color.
Indeed, it was so tainted with communistic associations that
President Buchanan, in vetoing the Homestead bill of 1860,

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 649

could say with no little justice that the attempted raid on
the public domain had the savor of the subversive doctrines
then fermenting in Europe.

In spite of Buchanan’s protest the agrarian creed had
spread so far and penetrated so deeply that nothing could
stop its progress. It was supported by the indisputable fact
of industrial misery, sustained by a promise of liberty.
Making a strong appeal to the urban masses, it sank like
a wedge into the ranks of mechanics and laborers who had
gathered under the standard of Jacksonian Democracy.
And when the Republicans in their platform of 1860 offered
free land to the workingmen of the world, in exchange for
a protective tariff, the way was already prepared for a
tumultuous response. When in the midst of the Civil War
the Republicans fulfilled their pledge by beginning to fling
the land to the clamoring multitude, the economic revolu-
tion was begun. If labor could continue its process of or-
ganization to win higher wages, there was little for the
socialists of the period to do except haul down the red flag.

§

On no point did southern orators dwell with more assur-
ance than on the stability and solidity of the social order in
the South, when compared with the turbulence and perils of
the North. The enslavement of the whole body of laborers,
as one of them remarked at the time, went ‘‘a long way to
neutralize the ruinous effects of universal suffrage and to
limit the absolute quality of popular sovereignty,” while it
furnished to some extent a counterpoise to “‘liberty of con-
science, free inquiry, and endless discussion.” Every-
thing seemed to promise peace in the South. ‘‘The perfect
subordination of the laborers, spread thinly over wide sur-
faces,’ continued the same philosopher; ‘‘the isolation of
families, forming diminutive centers of small communities
bound together by the closest ties of mutual affection, de-
pendence, and interest; the peaceful occupations of hus-

650 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

bandry; the plenty which everywhere abounds; the almost
utter absence of want; the intimate communion with nature;
all things, in short, tend to tranquillize society and exclude
the sentiments and riotous scenes so common in denser com-
munities and in large manufacturing districts crowded with
free white laborers who are at the same time noisy poli-
ticlans, debaters, and voters.”’

For the moment appearances seemed to support the
argument of the confident orator. Slavery stood four
square to all the winds of agitation. The heavy sanction
of the centuries was still upon it. When the curtain rose
on the historic stage bondmen were even then toiling under
the lash, tilling the fields, guarding flocks, and rearing monu-
ments to their rulers. Strange as it may seem, slavery had
marked an upward stage in social evolution: prisoners of
war who had formerly been put mercilessly to the sword
were spared and sent to labor in servitude. Through the
long epochs of antiquity, slavery formed the foundation of
kingdoms, empires, and republics—the civilizations of
Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. ;

If with the collapse of the Roman empire and the rise
of Christianity slavery almost disappeared in the western
world, the peasants who labored in the fields of Europe
during the Middle Ages were serfs bound to the soil, not
freemen in any modern sense. Though the Church frowned
upon the enslavement of Christians by “heathen” races,
though medieval economy was unfavorable to chattel
bondage in any form, neither the Bible nor the Papacy laid
slavery strictly under the ban. If Christians on principle
cherished a deep-seated antipathy to the institution as such,
most of them quickly overcame that repugnance when an
opportunity to profit from it was presented. At all events
it is not recorded that any of the great powers—either
Catholic or Protestant—whose conquerors and colonizers
followed in the wake of Columbus forbade their subjects
to enslave the natives in the lands they discovered or pro-
hibited the practice of snatching Negroes from Africa for

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 651

servitude. Undoubtedly English theologians were for a
time vexed by the question as to whether bondmen should
be taught the Christian doctrine of salvation, but that prob-
lem in casuistry in no way involved the validity of slavery
itself.

It was therefore under ancient and religious ordinances
that the institution became lawful in all the thirteen English
colonies in America. Under similar sanctions the carrying
trade, traffic in Negroes, flourished. Puritan shipowners,
who seized and transported Africans to the planting dis-
tricts, seemed to suffer no more pangs of conscience than
southern masters who bought them. Women like men
shared in the trade and lived by the system.

Though chattel servitude was lawful in the northern
states when the republic was established, there were then
only about forty thousand slaves in that section as compared
with seven hundred thousand in the South. And most of the
northern bond folk were domestic servants rather than
laborers in field and shop. Climate, soil, and economic
practices, as already indicated, hindered the extension of
slavery in the North, while the influx of free white laborers,
more skilled and more industrious, also helped to restrict
the area of its utility. Moreover, the growth of commerce
and industry steadily diminished its relative importance in
the North.

Hence, by the time the importation of Negroes was for-
bidden by federal law in 1808, chattel slavery was on the
wane everywhere above the Delaware River—and the
moral objection to the institution was deepening. ‘The
Massachusetts constitution of 1780 abolished it by impli-
cation and Pennsylvania in the same year made provision
for gradual emancipation. In 1787, the Congress pro-
hibited slavery in the Northwest Territory by the memor-
able ordinance for government and liberty. In 1799, New
York declared that all children of slaves born after July 4
of that year should be free, though held as apprentices for
a term; and about a quarter of a century later it removed

652 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the last dwindling vestiges of human bondage. By one
method or another all the commonwealths north of Dela-
ware gradually outlawed slavery.

If none of the southern states emulated these examples,
it did not follow that opinion in the South was at first alto-
gether unanimous on either the moral or the economic
aspects of the subject. On the contrary, there were in the
early days of the republic many southern statesmen who
saw in slavery a wasteful system of labor and the one source
of difference between the two sections that boded ill for the
future. In Delaware and Maryland, the growth of trade
and the increase in the number of free white farmers thrust
slavery somewhat into the background. In North Carolina,
where so much of the soil consisted of broken upland,
slavery was confined by nature within relatively narrow
bounds. In Virginia, likewise, the whole western region,
unsuited to plantations, was possessed by white farmers
who were in constant political conflict with their slave-
owning neighbors on the coastal plain. Even the seaboard
region of Virginia was being impoverished by slave labor
and the number of slaves was multiplying too rapidly for
the output of agricultural produce.

In these circumstances shrewd observers questioned the
economic advantages of a system which in effect hindered
the inflow of free artisans and adventurous capital, ex-
hausted the primeval fertility of the soil, and created a
master class steeped in pride and complacency. More than
one Virginia thinker believed that the state would be better
off in every way without slavery. Jefferson, as we have
said, was opposed to it and at the time of the American
Revolution was prepared to abolish it, believing that it was
contrary to the genius of American liberty. “I tremble for
my country,” he said, “‘when I reflect that God is just; that
his justice cannot sleep forever.”’

With his national outlook, Washington hoped that eman-
cipation could be brought about in good time. ‘‘Not only
do I pray for it on the score of human dignity,” he once

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 653

remarked, “‘but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the
rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our
union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
Only in South Carolina and Georgia, where the high mor-
tality of slaves in the rice swamps and the hotter climate
made tropical labor seem more desirable, were the spokes-
men of the planters fairly consistent champions of the insti-
tution from the beginning to the end. Even so, the planting
interests in general were so pliant on the issue that the
Missouri Compromise dedicating the lion’s share of the
Louisiana territory to freedom could be carried through the
Congress of the United States in 1820.

§

During the next forty years, however, there occurred in
the slave system itself a revolution almost as shattering as
that wrought in handicraft industry in the North by steam
and steel, drawing it into the very same economic trans-
formation. While the spinning jenny and the loom altered
the economy of New England, they introduced new elements
into the planting system of the South, especially after Eli
Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794. Unaided by ma-
chinery a slave could extract the seeds from about one pound
of raw cotton in a whole day; but with Whitney’s first crude
instrument a slave could clean fifty pounds and, when the
invention was improved and harnessed to steam, a thousand
pounds a day.

Henceforward, owing to the continual improvement of
textile machinery, the use of power, and the perfection of
the cotton gin, the earth’s multitudes were to have cloth
for a few cents a yard and the demand for raw cotton was
to stretch to the breaking point the energies of southern
planters. Until the end of the eighteenth century, rice,
indigo, and tobacco had been the chief staples raised by
the labor of slaves. The cultivation of rice was restricted
by nature to certain areas and the demand for tobacco,

654 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

though growing, was not equal to the demand for cloth to
cover nakedness.

Under the pressure of the expanding textile market, the
call for cotton rose from year to year, and before half a
century had elapsed the economic order of the South was
overturned. When the transformation began, planters of
the old régime had settled down into a position very much
like that of the English landed gentry—fairly content with
established estates and the scheme of refinement transmitted
by their ancestors. From generation to generation, their
broad acres had been cultivated by slaves that had come
down in the family. If masters frequently added new sec-
tions of land with the natural increase of their labor supply,
they were seldom fired into feverish activities by the passion
for making huge accumulations of riches. But under assaults
by ruthless, aggressive, profit-making managers of slaves
bent on an ever-increasing output of cotton to feed to
hungry mills of England and the North, customary practices
were compelled to yield—to give place to a force that was
akin in spirit to the dynamic and acquisitive capitalism of
the industrial world.

The results of this powerful surge were exigent and dis-
ruptive. A relentless drive was begun to secure more land
for exploitation, additional areas in the old states and still
more territory in the southwest, the Caribbean, and Central
America. In this fierce quest for acreage, planters of North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama advanced
into the piedmont, adding small farms to their domains,
enlarging the area of slavery, and thrusting their white
neighbors into the mountains or out into the Northwest.
Never satisfied, they pressed onward, across the Miss-
issippi, through Louisiana and into Texas. After help-
ing to bring an imperial realm into the Union, they
turned their eyes southward for still new worlds to conquer,
threatening in the flaming Ostend manifesto of 1854—
issued by three American ministers abroad—to wrest Cuba
from Spain. With equal urgency they placed a premium on

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 655

large-scale production and multiplied their demand for
Negro labor.

Stirred by the volcanic energies of capitalism, slavery of
the traditional type underwent a drastic change. Even in
the older sections where cotton culture did not flourish and
where the law of diminishing returns had threatened the
ultimate extinction of chattel servitude, the institution was
now given a new lease on life. Since surplus men, women,
and children could be sold to the planters of the cotton
belt, the breeding of slaves for an expanding market became
a highly lucrative business, stimulating the acquisitive in-
stincts of masters in the border states. |

So everywhere in the South the drive for profits now
imperiled those practices of humanity which in the best
of conditions had bound owners and slaves by cords of
interest and sympathy—ties akin to those which had united
the master workman and his employees in the days of the
handicrafts. Just as the northern manufacturer often
treated his laborers as mere commodities for exploitation
and threw them into the streets in times of business depres-
sion, so the cotton planter of the new régime frequently
looked upon his slaves as animals to be worked in gangs
and driven to the limits of endurance under the pressure of
immediate gain. An overseer who could not ‘‘make’’ the
maximum amount of cotton in a year was in mortal dange1-.
of losing his position at the head of the human machine.

Forced ever onward by the cumulative passion for gain,
cotton culture within the brief span of fifty years conquered
the whole South, thrusting itself upward in the end as the
dominant interest fated to rule all minor concerns with an
iron hand. When George Washington was inaugurated
President only two million pounds of cotton were produced
annually in the United States; by 1860 the output had risen
a thousandfold, to more than two billion pounds. When
Jefferson Davis took his place at the head of the Southern
Confederacy, nearly two-thirds of all the slaves in America
were engaged in cultivating that crop alone. To this revo-

656 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lution in the internal economy of the South was added the
centripetal influence of foreign connections. Furnishing the
staple upon which a vast system of English industry de-
pended for its very life, cotton growers were inexorably
drawn into the sweep of English polity, with something
approaching free trade as the logical and unavoidable
corollary. Thus the cotton drive focused the attention of
the slave states mainly upon a single interest and held it
there with remorseless tension. According to outward
signs, King Cotton seemed invincible at the middle of the
century. ‘‘No man living will see the end of slavery,” de-
clared even Emerson, the idealist, in 1859.

At that very hour, however, a crisis in cotton was in sight.
The area of rich virgin soil to be exploited by slave labor
had a fixed boundary in western Texas and when the last
fertile belt was brought under the plow an amazing era of
advance drew to an end. ‘Though imagists dreamed of
annexing Cuba and making excursions into Central America,
their mirages dissipated in failure. By 1860 the limits of
the American cotton kingdom were definitely fixed.

In the meantime the law of diminishing returns was be-
ginning to tell in the older provinces of the realm. It had
been by wearing out the land and moving on to new mines
of fertility that the greatest fortunes were made in the
grand years of prosperity. Hence a day of reckoning was
inescapable: the necessity for applying expensive fertilizers
and introducing more efficient methods of cultivation could
no longer be avoided. Moreover, the margin of profit being
thus put in peril, every kind of tribute collected on manu-
factured commodities bought by the cotton planters became
doubly galling. Like Prometheus, the South was stretched
upon the fateful rock, said Jefferson Davis, and only by an
almost superhuman effort could the fetters now be broken.
How was the impending crisis to be averted?

Several promising avenues of evasion seemed to open
before those who scanned the horizon. If the federal
government could be held in fee or a balance of power

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 657

maintained at Washington, then the duties on goods bought
by the planters could be kept at a minimum and all the
advantages of independence be secured under the Consti-
tution. Another solution offered was the introduction of
manufacturing into the South. Under the tutelage of Web-
ster, Whig leaders often counseled this procedure. Cotton
mills at hand, they argued, would provide local markets,
free them from the shackles of the New York exchange,
and emancipate them from the servitude to distant spinners.
Under the stimulus of this idea, societies were formed to
encourage the development of industries; indeed some note-
worthy experiments were made from time to time.

In the main these efforts bore little fruit. Planters did
not take kindly to manufacturing; their rural habits of life
ran against it—possibly they had the tribesman’s instinctive
dislike for unaccustomed ways. Skilled labor, as much as
business enterprise, was wanting; white immigrants from
Europe did not go in large numbers to a section where all
manual toil, whether in the home, field, or shop, lay under
a stigma; and slaves, though sometimes used in industries,
afforded poor material for technical branches of manufac-
turing in which they had received no training. Further,
there was a lack of capital for such undertakings. American
financiers, finding abundant opportunities for profitable
investments in the North and West, showed little disposi-
tion to push into unpromising regions dominated by slave
owners.

Still another scheme for giving strength to the cotton
kingdom was a proposal for a closer economic union with
the Northwest. Observing the drift of trade away from
New Orleans to the Atlantic ports, architects of southern
fortunes sketched elaborate plans for linking the upper
Mississippi Valley with the planting region. This was an
engrossing theme and it was enthusiastically discussed at
a railroad convention held in Knoxville, Tennessee, on
July 4, 1836, under the presidency of Hayne, the famous
orator who worked in economics besides constitutional

658 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

law. One of the fine dreams of the hour was a line from
Cincinnati to Charleston, making the South Carolina
metropolis a rival of Philadelphia and New York; but it
burst under the stern duress of realization.

Another project was a railway from the Lakes to the
Gulf and, under the management of that astute Yankee,
Stephen A. Douglas, this was finally accomplished. Though
popularly known as the competitor of Lincoln in the mo-
mentous debates of 1858, and as the author of ‘‘squatter
sovereignty,’ Douglas had a surer claim to distinction for
his work on the Illinois Central Railroad linking two strong-
holds of Democracy—lIllinois and Mississippi.

On his arrival in the Senate in 1847, he started a move-
ment to wring from Congress a huge grant of federal land
in aid of railway construction in his state and in spite of
many obstacles he made his way to the goal. Chicago
capitalists opposed his first plan for making Galena the
northern terminus; he won them over by choosing their city
instead. Southern statesmen offered grave constitutional
objections to federal aid for internal improvements; by
extending his line all the way from the Ohio to the Gulf
he overcame their scruples. After much wriggling and
writhing, enough votes were won, and in 1850 Congress
dedicated an immense area of the public domain to the
project for a “‘Lakes to Gulf” railway. The step was im-
portant but too late. Before the line could be completed,
Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had rail connec-
tions with the Mississippi Valley and were weaving all parts
of the North into one system of economy.

Notwithstanding every effort to give a new direction to
the sweep of economic forces, the dominant interest of the
South, the cotton planters, showed an increasing tend-
ency to swing away from the center of American life.
Their best market was England, then the textile center of
the world, where they could both sell their produce and buy
cheap manufactures of every kind. Confined by climate and
soil to special regions, their main basis of operation was of

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 659

necessity in the Far South, in the districts most remote from
the citadels. of northern industry and finance. By 1850,
two-thirds of the cotton crop in the United States was pro-
duced west of Georgia.

In its onward march the cotton interest had borne its
seat of power into the Mississippi Valley and worked a
revolution in the Jacksonian frontiers of Alabama, Missis-
sippi, and Louisiana. When South Carolina made her call
for nullification in 1832, all those states had given her a
sharp negative answer. In three decades, however, the face
of things had changed. When South Carolina renewed her
appeal in 1860, it was these very states of the Southwest
that raised the flag of revolution while Virginia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky still held back. Not
until the Confederate government had been inaugurated and
the first blow had been struck did the upper South cut loose
from the national moorings. And to the end, four of the
fifteen slave states—Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and
Missouri—and the western half of Virginia remained in
the Union. ‘They belonged rather to the system of the
North than to the specialized cotton system of the Far
South.

Under the drive of economic forces, it was the cotton
interest that led the slave states into the appalling crisis.
European conflicts, such as the Crimean War of 1854-56,
might raise hopes for an abnormal demand for cotton, but
an industry founded on uneducated labor, an industry that
was engaged in exhausting and selling the pristine fertility
of the soil was fated for a crash. In truth a decline in its
economic strength was under way while its faith in political
action was mounting: capacity to endure the tax of a pro-
tective tariff was diminishing while the determination of
the manufacturing interests to have their subventions was
rising to the point of an explosion. ‘Thus the cotton in-
dustry faced three alternatives: an internal reconstruction,
independence, or a foreign war. Following the historic
precedents set by interests in a similar plight, its spokesmen

660 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

chose what seemed to them the easiest course and found,
as often happens, not safety thereby, but ruin.

5

Like all the regions of the United States to the east and
south, the western frontier underwent a striking transforma-
tion between 1830 and the Civil War. At the former date,
the line of settlement, if we exclude a few communities
around the mouth of the Mississippi and in the Missouri
Valley, ran roughly along the western border of Alabama
and Tennessee, crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri,
and then turned back in a northeasterly direction through
Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to Lake Erie. Within three
decades, it had moved hundreds of miles to the west and
north; it had been broken by western trails and by the steady
march of pioneers up the slopes of the treeless plains.
Michigan had been admitted to the Union in 1837, Iowa in
1846, Wisconsin in 1848, and Minnesota in 1858.

In the meantime the new Middle West had been sup-
plemented by a second frontier on the coast where Cali-
fornia and Oregon stood as sentinels on the Pacific. They
too had no special economic interests or continental ties to
bind them to the cotton kingdom. Many Oregon farmers
doubtless remembered that it was southern politicians who
had been loudest in shouting “‘fifty-four forty or fight” and
quickest in compromising the boundary dispute with Eng-
land. In any event there was no slavery in Oregon. Neither
was there any chattel bondage in California, a mineral state
opposed, as Webster said, by the law of nature to the plant-
ing system. American traders had established commercial
interests there and miners had made them secure beyond all
cavil. ‘‘Gold is king,” firmly announced a Californian
member of Congress when he heard the praise of cotton
sung once too often on the floor. If there was a touch of
excessive pride in his boast, gold and grain, without doubt,
were to be reckoned in every new political combination.

THE SWEEP OF ECONOMIC FORCES 661

The frontier that had nourished Jacksonian Democracy
had now moved far to the West and it had also altered
its character, whereas the borders of the cotton kingdom
had become fixed by a law that no political party could
demolish, no act of Congress could repeal.

§

The revolution wrought by steam and machinery was

by no means limited in its effect to factory districts, corn
fields, cotton plantations, and mining camps. It widened
the borders of economic empire by the extension of Ameri-
can commerce into the Far Pacific. Though obscured to
the vulgar eye by the dust of domestic conflict, the construc-
tion of that commercial dominion went forward rapidly
from the foundation of the republic. The very year after
Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, the
Empress of China, fitted out partly at the expense of Robert
Morris, merchant prince and “financier of the American
Revolution,” sailed from New York to Canton, carrying
the American flag into the midst of the Dutch and British
pennants that fluttered in the breezes of Chinese waters.
Before the Fathers completed the framing of the Con-
stitution, at least nine voyages had been made to the Far
East by enterprising Yankees.
In the year of Washington’s inauguration, ten ships
from Salem plowed the waters of the Indian Ocean. Before
he delivered his “Farewell Address,” warning his country-
men against foreign entanglements, American captains were
at home in the ports of China, Java, Sumatra, Siam, India,
the Philippines, and the Ile de France. In 1797, the date
of his retirement to Mt. Vernon, a crew of thirty boys, the
oldest not over twenty-eight, took the Betsy, a boat of less
than a hundred tons, on a voyage around the world by way
of the Horn, Canton, and Good Hope, netting on an outlay
of about eight thousand dollars the neat profit of a hundred
and twenty thousand.

662 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Meanwhile Congress under a Constitution formed, as
Webster remarked, mainly for the advancement of com-
merce, granted to merchants trading with the Far East pro-
tective rates and special privileges of royal generosity—
advantages which assured magnificent returns except in the
most adverse of circumstances. As Senator from Pennsyl-
vania and a promoter of business with China, Robert Morris
could speak with authority among his brethren in the Con-
gress of the United States.

The trade thus begun at the very inception of the republic,
while it waxed and waned with the fortunes of war, politics,
and business in the western world, showed a general tend-
ency to advance. In the decade ending in 1840, American
business with China alone amounted to nearly seventy-five
millions, a sum greater than the total debt of the American
Revolution which timid souls in Hamilton’s day thought
the country could never pay. By that time American manu-
facturers, especially the cotton spinners, had come to view
China’s teeming multitudes as the marginal customers who
were to keep their wheels whirling and their coffers full.
In 1857 over a hundred and fifty American ships cleared
from Indian ports carrying goods worth upwards of ten
millions. |

When the guns of Sumter echoed over the plains and
through the valleys of the United States, shrewd American
business men had already gathered into their ships more
than half the trade to and from the port of Shanghai and
had made themselves masters of the lion’s share of the
commerce up and down the turgid current of the Yangtze.
The challenge of planters to captains of industry slowed
down this enterprise in the Far East—but only for a day.
Within a generation after the guns had ceased to fire on
brothers at home, the Stars and Strips were flying over the
American outpost of traffic in the Far East—the Philip-
pines. In this titanic process, disputes over slavery and
even the Civil War itself were incidents that delayed but
did not halt the giant of steam in his seven-league boots.

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CHAPTER XV
The Politics of the Economic Drift

P “HE distinctions which characterized the three great
sections of the United States evolved in the sweep
of economic forces were not fanciful; they were

woven out of the tough facts of daily existence. The

leaders in all these regions were of the same race, spoke

the same language, worshipped the same God, and had a

common background of law, ethics, and culture. Their

differences in sentiments, patterns of thought, and linguistic
devices—their social psychology—sprang mainly from
divergences in necessary adjustments to environment: labor
systems, climate, soil, and natural resources producing con-
spicuous variations in modes of acquisition and living.
Never before in the history of human societies had there
been just such a disposition of affairs. Conflicts between
agriculture and capitalism were, of course, as old as the
empires of antiquity. [he agrarian movements that shook

Rome to her foundations, the first French Revolution which

assured the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry,

and the long partisan struggles in England were all the
663

664 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

outward signs of internal divisions similar to those found
in every civilized community. Nevertheless no European
country had ever had a highly developed group of capital-
ists, a large body of independent farmers, and a powerful
landed aristocracy each to a marked degree segregated into
a fairly definite geographical area. No European country
had ever had gigantic industries battling for the possession
of the domestic trade and at the same time a highly special-
ized branch of agriculture, like cotton raising, almost solely
dependent for its profits upon a wide and attractive market
in foreign countries. |

The social conflicts of the Old World arose from hori-
zontal rather than from vertical divisions; that is, from
the antagonism of classes dwelling together rather than
from the friction of economic groups localized in separate
districts. It is true that strife based largely upon economic
differences had from time to time disturbed the various
federations which had made their bow on the European
stage, especially Germany, but in none of them did the
contest bear exactly the signs that characterized the Amer-
ican schism. Moreover, no modern European country ever
possessed an immense domain of virgin land available for
distribution among the populace by political methods and
viewed as a means of commanding party majorities requisite
for other ends.

Hence it came about that what may be called the rhetoric
of the American political process in the middle period
differed widely from that employed in similar struggles in
other countries of the world—a fact usually overlooked by
Europeans who attempt to devise formulas for American
social phenomena.

§

In each of the great geographical sections with its domi-
nant economic interest was evolved a reasoned scheme of
political action. Broadly speaking, the capitalists of the
Northeast demanded from Congress a liberal immigration

THE POLITICS OF THE: ECONOMIC DRIFT 665

policy to assure an abundance of cheap labor, ship subsidies
for the promotion of commerce, internal improvements in
the form of roads, canals, and harbor facilities, a sound
monetary system to guarantee that loans and interest would
be duly met in values at least equal to the nominal figure
in the bond, high tariffs for industries, and the preservation
of the protected market area by the retention of the south-
ern states in the Union. This was a heroic program which
its sponsors could only realize by securing the possession of
the executive and legislative branches of the federal gov-
ernment.

To this scheme of positive action a supplement of nega-
tion was essential for capitalism, namely, a firm grip on the
federal Supreme Court, for that body alone could enforce
by appropriate interpretation those clauses of the Constitu-
tion which forbade states to issue paper money and impair
the obligation of contract—in short, interfere with the nor-
mal course of business enterprise. It was well known that
debtors of the rural regions, since the days of Daniel Shays,
had shown a strong penchant for easy money and loose
banking because an inflated currency enabled them to meet
their obligations with more facility and less labor. It was
equally well known that several states had repudiated their
just debts, imposed onerous burdens on business undertak-
‘ings, and laid taxes objectionable to common carriers.

For these and similar reasons, the capitalist group re-
quired as a condition of highly successful operations the
enactment of a clear-cut program of federal legislation by
Congress and a friendly construction of the Constitution
by the federal courts. Of course it could be argued and
with cogency that such a program was designed ultimately
to benefit all interests and all sections of the country but
it is a significant political fact that the leaders of the plant-
ing and farming areas did not generally take this view of the
matter.

By their common agricultural interests, planters and
farmers were drawn together politically and thrown into

666 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

opposition to capitalists at many points. They were pro-
ducers of raw materials and food stuffs and they were pur-
chasers of manufactured goods. As far as they were con-
scious of economic processes, they naturally wished to sell
in the dearest market and buy in the cheapest, namely, in
Europe, and especially in England, where capitalist industry
was far advanced in skill and technique while labor was
ground to the very margin of existence. In brief, they
wanted to sell their raw materials and foodstuffs to English
manufacturers for high prices and buy English goods, made
by cheap English labor, at low prices. Broadly speaking
this meant that planters and farmers favored low tariffs—
tariffs for revenue only—though not often free trade with
the whole world, for that involved direct taxes on them-
selves for the sustenance of the federal government.

Yet another powerful bond of interest united these two
agricultural groups, especially on the frontier belt: both
were in need of capital and both were heavy borrowers in
the eastern financial market. Farmers often mortgaged
their lands and planters their estates and slaves for funds
with which to embark on their respective ventures, or to
expand them when once they were launched. Hence, being
debtors instead of creditors, they were frequently the
friends of easy money, of an elastic currency with varying
degrees of soundness.

And to promote their monetary designs, they had an
appropriate political scheme, supported by a full-blown con-
stitutional theory. They had not yet formulated any project
of national banking, dominated by ‘“‘dirt farmers,” that
would yield the desired fruit under their control. In the
national field their program was to destroy, rather than to
construct—to abolish the United States Bank, prevent its
revival, and put the issue of the currency in local hands,
under the authority of state legislatures in which they were
at home and easily supreme. The less scrupulous among
the debtors openly favored inflation by local banks as a
means of discharging their obligations in money of reduced

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 667

value and advocated lenient bankruptcy laws for those who
suffered a total shipwreck in finances.

Therefore, in the field of federal politics, the planting
and farming groups asked for few favors; on the national
stage they were in the main a party of laissez faire. And
their constitutional doctrines naturally took on the color
of their economic projects. Since they deemed it to their
interest to have no protective tariffs and federal banks, it
seemed reasonable to thet to believe that Congress had
no power under the Constitution to promote industries by
special legislation and create banking institutions. They
were, however, not beyond the necessity of consulting the
auguries. ‘They required at the hands of the judiciary a
wide interpretation of the Constitution in one particular,
at least; that is, a view of the revered document which would
permit states to charter and manage banks, issue paper
money, and make various modifications in the obligation
of contract.

It must be conceded, no doubt, that every planter who
stood like Horatius at the bridge for a strict interpretation
of the Constitution and every Tennessee farmer who
sprang upon a damask chair in the White House to cheer
for Jacksonian Democracy had not formulated the whole
scheme of things with meticulous precision but beyond ques-
tion the great leaders of both groups thoroughly compre-
hended the economic processes of the age. There was
ample proof of their understanding in the fact that the
general drift of federal legislation and judicial interpre-
tation after 1835 was directed to the interest of planters
and farmers until suddenly reversed by the constitutional
and social revolution popularly known in the North as the
Civil War and in the South as the War between the States.

§

It is not here contended that all capitalists with mechan-
ical exactness were drawn to one combination and all plant-

668 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ers and farmers to another. Such a contention would be
without historic warrant—contrary to the evidence in the
case. In each of the three economic groups were repre-
sented varying degrees and kinds of property and pros-
perity. Planters were not all engaged in producing the same
staples; neither did they enjoy the same rate of return on
their capital or suffer the same pressure of adversity in
times of financial depression. Some of them raised tobacco,
some rice, others cane, and still others cotton—the last
advancing to leadership in numbers and wealth. If cotton
men were keen for a low tariff, cane growers and sugar
makers were as eager for a high duty on their commodity
as any woolen manufacturer in New England, or iron
founder in Pennsylvania for a tariff on his peculiar product.

Moreover, among planters of the same class there was
inequality of status. Those who worked on the western
margin, mining and selling virgin soil, often made huge
profits while others to the east, who tilled land which had
lost its original fertility, labored heavily under the law of
diminishing returns. Account books of Calhoun’s own
estate reveal a moving story of a losing venture. It is not
to be overlooked that the “‘hot-bed”’ of secession was South
Carolina, where planters had been working worn-out land
for a quarter of a century.

Nor did northern capitalists, any more than planters,
present a perfectly united front on all matters. Manufac-
turers and their bankers were, on the whole, rather solidly
behind demands for high protection against foreign com-
petition. On the other hand capitalists engaged in the ship-
ping business, while anxious for subsidies and other special
favors, were by no means fervent in supporting revenue
measures that cut down the volume of the carrying trade.
Their intimate associates, importing merchants, although
capitalists in a large way, were as enthusiastic as any south-
ern planter for a low tariff admitting the easy flow of
commodities into the United States. Furthermore it must
be remembered that a large share of the importing mer-

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 669

chant’s business, especially in New York and Philadelphia,
embraced the exchange of southern produce for European
manufactures, linking merchandise with planting by sub-
stantial, if imponderable, bonds. Even finance was some- ©
what divided in its affections. In the strong boxes of north-
ern investors mortgages on southern plantations rested by
the side of industrial and railway securities; often a rich
money lender was a perfectly good Democrat.

Among western farmers there were also divergences.
Many of them grew hemp and wool and so welcomed pro-
tection by the government; some were prosperous either
through industry, luck, or unearned increment in land
values; others staggered under a burden of debt, tilling
marginal land. Inevitably, therefore, the tension and pat-
terns of their agrarian sentiments varied from community
to community and with the seasons of prosperity and
adversity.

Each of the three geographical sections, like each of the
three classes of individuals, on minute examination, dis-
closed dissimilarities. The map of slavery giving the dis-
tribution of bondmen among the counties of the southern
states was a document of prime importance in the economics
of politics. ‘Throughout large areas of western Virginia
and North Carolina, northern Georgia, eastern Kentucky
and Tennessee, northern Arkansas, and Missouri, excepting
the river valleys, slaves formed less than twenty-five per
cent of the population. The land of those regions belonged
to free farmers who owned no slaves, or few, and who tilled
the soil themselves; they, rather than the planters, furnished
the original substance of Jacksonian Democracy, in their
sections.

Nor were the manufacturing states of the Northeast a
single economic unit, solely concerned with industrial enter-
prise. ‘They possessed large agricultural interests likely to
manifest varying degrees of agrarian temper. In addition,
they had in their cities a growing working class which threat-
ened from decade to decade to play an independent role in

670 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

politics. Though generally thrown by social differences into
opposition to the capitalists, especially in local affairs, the
workingmen of the middle period were not all free traders;
a large proportion believed that their bread was better
buttered by protection than by a tariff for revenue only.
Particularly was this true in New England and Pennsylvania
with their great productive industries—as contrasted with
New York City, the mercantile metropolis.

And the farming states of the West, as previously noted,
were not without peculiar aspirations of their own. With
astonishing swiftness they passed through the pioneer stage
and began to supplement their rural economy by trading
and manufacturing. Other times, other manners. A little
woolen mill on the bank of an Indiana brook felt the benefi-
cent shade of a high tariff quite as much as a huge building
at Lowell, Massachusetts, filled with roaring machinery.
- Besides benefiting from such economic diversification, agri-
culture in the Mississippi Valley had its own psychological
fringe. Certainly a wide gulf separated the independent
white farmer who toiled like a slave in his narrow fields
under the burning sun from the great planter.who lived like
an aristocrat on his broad acres. ,

While the farmer was as eager as the planter to buy his
plows in the cheaper markets of England, he often found
it difficult to think of himself in the same class as Louisiana
cane growers who spent their summers at northern watering
places and attended grand opera in New Orleans in the
winter. He was by no means always sure that his interests
lay in a pan-agricultural combination for political action.
Very often the prospect of rising land values and better
markets offered by railways linking the Northwest to Penn-
sylvania, New York, and Massachusetts had attractions for
him that were hard to offset by pictures of the prosperity
afforded by free trade with Liverpool and Manchester. It
is not surprising therefore that the political architects of
the middle period encountered grave difficulties in attempt-
ing to erect enduring political associations out of economic

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 671

interests that were both sectional and diverse—diffculties
which were increased by the periodic cycles of prosperity
and panic.

§

Nevertheless, each of the three economic classes strug-
gling for dominance in its own section and in the country
at large had able spokesmen who attempted to formulate
its program of political action, its scheme of ethical justi-
fication, and its line of attack on the opposing forces. In.
fact, all the resources of history, law, philosophy, logic, the-
ology, and natural science, as they stood revealed at the
time, were employed with amazing effect in a mighty tri-
angular struggle that ran through politics, religion, jour- ’
nalism, education, and literature. Every orator who took
part in it seemed sincerely convinced that his cause was
righteousness itself and was apparently unable to under-
stand why his own arguments failed to persuade others
through the sheer force of compelling reasonableness.

If any satirical spectators ever perceived the incongrui-
ties of the rationalizing operation, they failed to turn the
weapons of Juvenal and Swift upon the diligent apostles of
rectitude. Those statesmen who raised themselves with
heroic effort a little above the din of the partisan conflict
and tried to emancipate themselves from the narrow con-
fines of class psychology could not by the noblest exercise
of imagination divine any solution for the contradictions
except in some compromise or a balance of interests based
upon the delusive assumption that stability and quiescence
were possible in a swiftly changing society. Webster and
Clay, oppressed by an awful foreboding of a crash to come,
could only pray for a postponement of the deluge—ask God
to grant that their dying eyes at least might behold no
broken and dissevered Union.

§

672 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Of the capitalistic interests in general—manufacturing,
transportation, and banking—the one spokesman who tow-
ered above all others was, by common consent, Daniel
Webster of Massachusetts. He was a true son of New
England business enterprise, fully appreciated by those
whom he served. When it was discovered that his salary
as United States Senator was not sufficient to keep him in
that style of living which he had chosen for himself, a num-
ber of wealthy men raised a capital fund and placed the
income at his service. ‘‘Some of those who contributed,”
remarks Webster’s admiring biographer, S. G. Fisher,
‘‘were interested in the industries sustained by the pro-
tective tariff; though by no means all.”

Webster was a philosopher as well as a spokesman of eco-
nomic forces. That he knew his Aristotle, Harrington, and
Montesquieu, his Plymouth Rock oration abundantly
demonstrated. He believed that the form and frame of
governments were determined by the nature and distribution
of property, that American institutions were founded on
property, that property ought to have a direct representa-
tion in the government, and that the disastrous revolutions
of the past had been revolutions against accumulations of
wealth. Likewise a student of the Constitution, Webster
correctly understood the economic features of that instru-
ment. On this point, he gave the substance of his creed in
a speech delivered at Andover in 1843: ‘We may look
at the debates in all the state conventions and the expo-
sitions of all the greatest men in the country, particularly
in Massachusetts and Virginia, . . . and we shall find it
everywhere held up as the main reason for the adoption of
the Constitution that it would give the general government
the power to regulate commerce and trade.”

That Webster firmly grasped the economic character of
the political conflict in which he was a figure of gigantic
proportions is also evident from numerous speeches. In
none of these did he more effectively summarize the points
of his doctrine than in an address to his party brethren of

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 673

Boston setting forth the objects of what was called ‘‘the
Whig Revolution of 1840.’ With trip hammer strokes he
drove them home: permanent peace with England, a stable
revenue adequate to the needs of the federal government,
the protection of domestic industry, the destruction of the
compromise tariff of 1833 so inimical to the manufacturing
interests, and finally a restoration of the currency and public
credit by a sound banking and financial system.

Knowing very well that many a mechanic and farmer
who had flocked to Jackson’s conquering hosts regarded
the tariff as a special privilege rendered by Congress to
mill owners, Webster was careful on various occasions to
meet the argument at the threshold. “I am looking,”
he once said, ‘‘not for such a law as will benefit capitalists—
they can take care of themselves—but for a law that shall
induce capitalists to invest their capital in such a manner
as to occupy and employ American labor.” Then he turned
to the agrarian opponents of protection. ‘‘If all men in a
country were merely agricultural producers, ,free trade
would be very well,” he remarked; but he quickly coun-
tered by saying that the interests of the United States were
widely diversified, leading to a conclusion that seemed inevit-
able in his mind. ‘There are many false prophets going
to and fro in the land who declare that the tariff benefits
only the manufacturer and that it injures the farmer. This
is all sheer misrepresentation. Every farmer must see that
it is his interest to find a near purchaser for his produce, to
find a ready purchaser, and a purchaser at a good price.”
Such in brief was Webster’s view of the essential economic
factors involved in the politics of the middle period.

On the outstanding moral issue of the hour, the abolition
of slavery, Webster with unerring accuracy summarized
the opinion entertained by the wealth and talents of Massa-
chusetts. ‘I regret,’ he said, “that slavery exists in the
southern states; but it is clear and certain that Congress
has no power over it. It may be, however, that in the dis-
pensations of Providence, some remedy of this evil may

674 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

occur, or may be hoped for hereafter. But in the meantime
I hold to the Constitution of the United States.”

§

On the side of the planting interests, the issues of state-
craft arising from the economic conflict were logically sum-
marized and expounded by John C. Calhoun of South Caro-
lina, a spokesman no less gifted than Webster. In a re-
markable speech delivered in 1839 he traced the history of
American politics from the foundation of the republic to
his own time—covering in a summary interpretation the
events we have already surveyed—and then sketched his
map of the new battlefield. He opened by reviewing the
old Jeffersonian case against the Federalists. Hamilton’s
policy, he said, had been to enlist “the more powerful classes
of society, through their interests,” to the support of his
system.

The great Federalist statesman, Calhoun then con-
tinued, had chartered the Bank with a capital ‘“‘to be com-
posed principally of stock held by public creditors; thus
binding more strongly to the government that already pow-
erful class, by giving them, through its agency, increased
profit, and a decided control over the currency, exchanges,
and the business transactions of the country.” ‘This was
not all; Hamilton had also proposed to pervert the taxing
function ‘‘from a revenue to a penal power through which
the entire capital and industry of the Union might be con-
trolled.”

Against this combination of economic forces, Jefferson
strove with all his might but such gains as he made were
transitory. After the War of 1812, Hamilton’s system re-
newed its youth; the protective tariff, the United States
Bank, internal improvements, and the other devices of the
moneyed interests were approved again and John Quincy
Adams, son of an old Federalist, was given a four-year term
in the White House.

_ Then came the Jacksonian revulsion and the new revo-

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 675

lution—the stages of which Calhoun proceeded to enu-
merate. The first stroke was the expulsion of Adams and
his group from power; the second was the discharge of the
funded debt; the third was the compromise tariff act of
1833, which professed to close ‘‘forever in this government
a most prolific source of power, patronage, and corruption;”
the fourth was the overthrow of the United States Bank;
and the fifth was ‘‘the suspension of the connection between
the government and the banks.”

Calhoun now listed the remaining steps leading to his
perfect order: the work of separating the government from
banks must be completed; internal improvements must be
stopped; the cost of the federal government enhanced by
pensions and patronage must be reduced; and the tariff
at the expiration of the compromise act in 1833 must be
revised in such a manner as to put ‘‘an end to the protective
system, with all the evils that follow and ever must follow
in its train.”

Of his real purpose Calhoun made no concealment: ‘“‘My
aim is fixed. It is no less than to turn back the government
to where it commenced its operation in 1789; to obliterate
all the intermediate measures originating in the peculiar
principles and policy of the school to which I am opposed.”
As for slavery, the foundation of the planting system, that
was in the circumstances “‘a good, a perfect good.” There
was thus no doubt about the character of Calhoun’s eco-
nomic-political argument. It was precisely stated and dia-
metrically opposed to that of Webster.

In dealing with constitutional questions, the master
logician of South Carolina also showed himself the peer
of the Massachusetts statesman, though he drew exactly
contrary conclusions from identical patterns of language.
Notwithstanding the fact that he had himself supported
the tariff of 1816, Calhoun came to believe and wrote pow-
erful briefs to prove that the Constitution did not authorize
the economic measures which Webster advocated and that
his own latest program of low tariffs alone had the sanction

676 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of the Fathers. To their great covenant Calhoun’s devo-
tion was no less profound than that of Webster. His con-
viction that it proclaimed his gospel was no less firmly
rooted. For him it simply had one meaning; for Webster
another.

§

No towering giant like Webster or Calhoun rose from
field and forest to formulate the political and constitutional
creed of the independent farmers, East, West, and South;
and yet the tillers of the soil had their spokesmen no less
than the capitalists and planters. Orators of the second
and third magnitude swarmed to their cause, filling pages
of the Congressional Globe with arguments prolix and
vehement. Two of these—both national figures for a day
—presented their thesis with singular force and consistency.
The first was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, such a power
in his realm that the Republicans, with an eye upon the
farmer vote and additional strength for Lincoln, nominated
him for the vice-presidency in 1864. The second was C. L.
Vallandigham of Ohio, whom Lincoln later made tempo-
rarily famous by expelling him for intransigent opposition
to the War. And the popularity which both enjoyed in the
rural regions was no doubt largely due to the vigor with
which they waged their political campaign against the
capitalist class. |

In the spirit of Jefferson, sometimes in the very words
of the Virginian, Johnson again and again recited in Con-
gress the creed of the farmer and rural mechanic. ‘The
rural population, the mechanical and agricultural portions
of this community are the very salt of it,’’ exclaimed the
tailor from Tennessee. ‘‘Mr. Jefferson never said a truer
thing than when he declared that large cities are eye
sores in the body-politic: in Democracies they are consum-
ing cancers. ... Build up your villages, build up your
rural districts, and you will have men who rely upon their
own industry, who rely upon their own ingenuity, who rely

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 677

upon their own economy and application to business for
support. . . . Our true policy is to build up the middle
class; to sustain the villages, to populate the rural districts,
and let the power of this Government remain with the mid-
dle class! I want no miserable city rabble on the one hand.
I want no pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy on the
other.” To this representative of farmers and village me-
chanics sustained by agriculture, the policies of Webster
and Calhoun were equally odious.

The other advocate of the small farmer, Vallandigham,
sang the bucolic song to a similar refrain. According to his
view, the conflict of the period was at bottom a contest
between plutocracy on the one hand and labor in the shop
and field on the other; but in the exigencies of politics he
was willing to make use of an alliance with the planting
aristocracy to realize his objects.

In a powerful speech delivered in 1861 he drew in bold
strokes his history of the long political contest then merging
into a revolution. ‘The great dividing line,” he said, ‘‘was
always between capital and labor—-between the few who
had money and wanted to use the government to increase
and ‘protect’ it, as the phrase goes, and the many who had
little but wanted to keep it and who only asked the gov-
ernment to let them alone.” ‘The issues arising from this
conflict, he went on, had taken various forms: “a permanent
public debt, a national bank, the public deposits, a protective
tariff, internal improvements, and other questions of a
similar character, all of them looking to the special in-
terests of the moneyed classes.”’ Around these issues the
capitalists had rallied parties under various names, but each
time they had encountered a formidable combination of sec-
tional interests.

The planting South, he reasoned, ‘‘was the natural ally
of the Democracy of the North and especially of the West.”
Why? ‘Partly because the people of the South are chiefly
an agricultural and producing, non-commercial and non-
manufacturing people, and partly because there is no con-

678 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

flict, or little conflict among them between capital and labor,
inasmuch as to a considerable extent capital owns a large
class of laborers not of the white race.’’ Out of this na-
tional union of planters and farmers had sprung the pow-
erful party of the Democracy and in each great open trial
of strength between 1800 and 1860 the popular combina-
tion had emerged triumphant.

Then in utter despair, exclaimed Vallandigham, the
champions of ‘‘the moneyed interest’? resorted “‘to some
other and new element for an organization which might be
made strong enough to conquer and destroy the Democracy
and thus obtain control of the federal government.”
Searching hungrily for a new combination of power, they
eventually discovered “‘the nucleus of such an organization
ready formed to their hands—an organization odious in-
deed in name but founded on two of the most powerful
passions of the human heart: sectionalism, which is only
a narrow and localized patriotism, and anti-slavery, or love
of freedom, which commonly is powerful in proportion as
it is very near coming home to one’s self or very far off.”

5

In this clash of sectional interests, the outstanding issue
of the middle period was the tariff. From it sprang nulli-
fication in South Carolina and South Carolina finally led
the way into secession. In general it was the representatives
of the manufacturing group who fostered the demand for
protection and showed the greatest facility in gathering
recruits for that cause in national elections. On the whole,
opposition to protection and support for free trade, or at
all events low rates of duty, came from the agricultural and
importing interests.

Yet the matter, as already indicated, was by no means
simple. Every revenue law imposing taxes on goods coming
into the United States was a complex of many items
arranged under several separate schedules—a complex

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 679

which in practice reflected the demands of many groups and
factions, sometimes even conciliating opposing interests by
compensatory favors of real or dubious utility. In these
circumstances, American political society presented revolv-
ing kaleidoscopic patterns whenever the revenue question
was up for controversy. Woolen manufacturers and sheep
raisers might be united by a tariff that protected both cloth
and raw wool but sent flying asunder by hardware schedules.
Hemp and flax growers burned brown under blazing suns
might be made to feel a common cause with steel and
iron magnates bleeched white in shaded offices. Neverthe-
less two powerful agricultural groups, cotton and tobacco
growers, supplemented by corn raisers, provided a fairly
consistent leadership for a relentless war against the gen-
eral principle of protection for manufactures.

Five times between 1830 and 1860 the tariff was revised,
showing on the whole a downward tendency. A sliding-
scale cut was made in 1833, as we have seen, under a threat
of revolution on the part of South Carolina’s planters, and,
when, nearly ten years later, the Whigs with aid from the
opposition forced the duties upward again, the champions
of low tariffs swept the polls in the election of 1844. Then
the tide definitely turned, the Democratic party under south-
ern leadership driving the country steadily in the direction
of free trade until the grand climax of 1860. By the tariff
act of 1846, Congress struck a smashing blow at the pro-
tective system, the members of the South and West being
in the vanguard of the majority that did the terrible exe-
cution; of the ninety-three votes against the measure in the
House, New England and the Middle States furnished
sixty-three.

As this law soon brought a surplus into the Treasury,
triumphant Democracy delivered another savage thrust in
1857 making the rates still lower—in actual operation below
the figure set in the famous compromise of 1833. Though
the vote on this bill in the House seemed to reveal a con-
fused state of public opinion in the large, it betrayed unmis-

680 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

takable tendencies. Members from the South and South-
west cast sixty votes for the measure and but two against it.
More salient still was the fact that the West and North-
west furnished thirty-three votes against tariff reduction and
only fourteen for it. The South was now almost solid; the
West was evidently swinging away from its old moorings
and was in a mood for a new political combination—one
so adroitly effected at Chicago in 1860.

In the course of the long conflict over the tariff, statesmen
from the South worked out a positive theory as to its prac-
tical effect on the distribution of wealth. The creed was
perfectly formulated in a logical fashion by Senator
McDuffie of South Carolina as early as 1830, all elabora-
tions by those who followed in his footsteps being merely
fine glosses on his protocol. In the Senator’s own words,
the argument ran as follows: ‘Owing to the federative
character of our Government, the great geographical extent
of our territory, and the diversity of the pursuits of our
citizens in different parts of the Union, it has so happened
that two great interests have sprung up, standing directly
opposed to each other.” The first of these interests em-
braces the manufacturers who cannot thrive in the face of
European competition without protection and subsidies from
the government; the second is composed of the producers of
agricultural staples in the South—staples that can find a
market only in foreign countries and can be advantageously
sold ‘“‘only in exchange for the foreign manufactures which
come into competition with those of the Northern and Mid-
dle States. . . . These interests then stand diametrically
and irreconcilably opposed to each other. ‘The interest, the
pecuniary interest, of the Northern manufacturer is directly
promoted by every increase of the taxes imposed on South-
ern commerce; and it is unnecessary to add that the interest
of the Southern planter is promoted by every diminution of
the taxes imposed on the productions of his industry.”

Thus the southern statesman reduced this phase of the
political struggle of the middle period to its final terms: a

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 681

conflict over the distribution of wealth. The planter de-
sired a public policy that put money into his pocket, or, to
use his customary language, enabled him to keep it there;
the manufacturer of the North clamored for a policy that
transferred it into his own. In McDufhe’s mind it was the
old and simple plan of getting and keeping; no political
litany could obscure the issue for the initiates. Within two
decades, practically all the statesmen of the planting inter-
est were unreservedly committed to the Senator’s faith.

No mere academic theory was this concept of the political
battle. Statisticians of the South even tried to visualize it
in terms of dollars and cents by figuring out the exact
amount of “tribute” paid by the planting class to the capi-
talists of the North. In that calculation they estimated
that forty million dollars in round numbers had been poured
into the coffers of northern shipowners by 1850 in the form
of freight rates, Finding that southern exports amounted
to about one hundred millions annually, they came to the
conclusion that this enormous sum was in fact lent without
interest to northern merchants for use in the manipulation
of foreign and domestic exchanges. ‘The toll levied on the
South by machine industry, they thought, was especially
burdensome. ‘‘Were she to work up her 2,500,000 bales
of cotton,’”’ exclaimed a southern economist, ‘‘and receive
the profit of $40 each, she would realize 70 to 100 millions
annually.” To cap the climax, the calculators estimated
that the southern people spent fifteen millions in the North
traveling for health and pleasure.

If the figures sometimes missed the mark, the thesis was
at least plain: through all the economic processes of trade,
manufacture, exchange, merchandizing, and luxury, the
South was taxed and exploited—in stark reality, brought
down to the status of a tribute bearer to northern capital-
ism. ‘Ihe South,’ lamented one orator, “‘stands in the
attitude of feeding upon her own bosom a vast population
of merchants, shipowners, capitalists, and others who, with-
out the claims of her progeny, drink up the life blood of her

682 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

trade. It cannot be here asserted that a deduction should
be allowed for that portion of the southern crop which is
shipped directly from the southern ports to foreign coun-
tries. [he tonnage register will show that nine-tenths of
the shipping employed belong to northern capitalists. . . .
Where then goes the value of our labor but to those who,
taking advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell
to us, and after turning our own capital to their profitable
account return laden with our money, to enjoy their easily
earned opulence at home?”

From this point of view the task before the planting
states was, therefore, emancipation from the dominion of
northern capitalism. ‘‘We confidently affirm,” declared
McDufhe, “‘that the people of the southern and southwest-
ern states are invoked by considerations of the most enlight-
ened patriotism, as well as of an enlightened self-interest,
to apply a speedy and effective remedy. The means of
achieving our commercial independence are abundant.”

§

A second phase of this titanic conflict over the distribu-
tion of wealth involved the problem of controlling the cur-
rency and banking. Was it to be centralized under national
auspices or dispersed among the states? Asa rule, Hamil-
ton’s system of consolidation, while it was in effect, had
been favored by northern business men because it afforded
elastic credit facilities and guaranteed a sound currency for
trade throughout the entire United States. Generally
speaking, the opposition to that system had come from the
agricultural sections. The party which destroyed the sec-
ond federal bank so ruthlessly that the Whigs could never
restore it was Jackson’s farmer-labor combination, the new
Democracy of the middle period.

And yet it would be a mistake to assume that the Demo-
crats refused all political relations with banks. On the con-
trary, they adopted the policy of depositing federal funds

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 683

in local banks, chartered under state authority, with a view
to securing effective assistance akin to that furnished first
to the Federalists and then to the Whigs by the United
States Bank—a practice which helped to release the tension
of ‘tight money” in the West and South and afforded funds
for land speculation as well. It was not without some
justification that the shrewd Davy Crockett, commenting
on the fruits of the system, remarked: ‘‘It requires an eye
as insinuating as a dissecting knife to see what safety there
is in placing one million of the public funds in some little
country shaving shop with no more than one hundred thou-
sand dollars capital. This bank, we will suppose without
being too particular, is in the neighborhood of the public
lands where speculators who have everything to gain and
nothing to lose swarm like crows about carrion. They buy
the United States’ lands upon a large scale, get discounts
from the aforesaid shaving shop which are made upon a
large scale, also upon United States funds; they pay the
whole purchase money with these discounts and get a clear
title to the land, so that when the shaving shop comes to
make a Flemish account of her transactions, ‘the Govern-
ment’ (i.e., President Jackson) will discover that he has
not only lost the original deposit, but a large part of the
public lands to boot.”

In fact, so notorious did the evils become that the Demo-
crats in control of the federal government were forced to
abandon the distribution of the revenues among banking
concerns and safeguard their funds by establishing an inde-
pendent treasury system. ‘Thus the national government
was cut loose from banks altogether. Neither the elo-
quence of Webster nor the persuasion of Clay could induce
farmers and planters to agree to the creation of a third
United States Bank; the obvious beneficiaries of such an
institution were not as numerous and widespread as those
who partook of the advantages of a protective tariff.

The destruction of the second United States Bank, of
course, left unsolved the problem of the currency—that

684 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

powerful engine which could be used for transferring wealth
from one group to another as well as for supplying the
means of commerce. Since the Constitution mentioned
only gold and silver coin, there were in the early days of
the republic a few statesmen who clung fiercely to hard
money in the belief that the right to issue paper would be
employed to favor the politicians, if exercised by the gov-
ernment, and to enrich the capitalists, if vested in private
corporations.

But those who adhered to this view were soon over-
borne; the volume of metal was too small, the necessities of
commerce too great. Accordingly, the first United States
Bank founded in 1791 was authorized to emit bills and
before it came to an end twenty years later, numerous local
banks, chartered by the respective states, had also been
empowered to scatter notes broadcast. In 1815 there were
already in existence more than two hundred state banks;
and after the abolition of the second United States Bank
in 1836 they flourished like green bay trees. Each year saw
additions to the number until on the eve of the Civil War
there were sixteen hundred institutions, with a circula-
tion of $202,000,000 in bills based upon $87,700,000 in
specie.

While many of these local banks were managed conserva-
tively, others, especially in the South and West, were in the
hands of inexperienced, often unscrupulous, operators; and
every time there was a financial crisis some of them went to
the wall, causing serious losses to the holders of their paper.
For example, one of these “‘financial institutions,’ fittingly
named “wildcat banks,’’ wound up its affairs in chancery
with bills to the face value of $580,000 in circulation and
$86.46 in specie on hand for redemption. In vain did offi-
cial inspectors of state banks seek to prevent such frauds:
the devices of the ‘financiers’? were too cunning for the
best of watchmen. A specially clever manager, for in-
stance, spread a layer of gold and silver on a foundation
of nails and glass in his strong box, giving the appearance

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 685

of “great resources.’”’ A whole group of banks conspired
to defeat the law by sending specie from one to another in
advance of the inspector. ‘Gold and silver,” complained
a perplexed commissioner, ‘‘flew about the country with the
celerity of magic; its sound was heard in the depths of the
forest, yet like the wind, one knew not whence it came or
whither it was going.”

With increasing velocity a flood of paper poured out
upon the nation, some of it sound, some of it quickly depre-
ciating, and nearly all of it fluctuating violently with the
oscillations of business. As time passed, affairs grew worse
rather than better. ‘The development of railways spread
all over the country the notes of local banks—frequently
bills, known in the vernacular as “‘shin plasters,” calling for
sums as low as five cents. The growth of interstate com-
merce aggravated the disease until bewildered merchants
and capitalists were driven to desperation trying to keep
their accounts straight in paper that went up and down from
day to day.

To make a long story short, on the eve of the final
crash in 1860, the American currency system, under the
drive of an agrarian democracy, had reached a state rela-
tively more alarming, if possible, to business enterprise than
it had attained under the Articles of Confederation in the
previous century. Only a Daniel Shays was needed to re-
produce the earlier terror.

So grave were the evils of loose banking that they could
hardly be overlooked by anyone. Indeed they were early
assailed by the radical agrarians themselves with scarcely
less vehemence than by business men. As a matter of fact
the banks chartered under state authority were corporations
of capitalists and objects of suspicion to Jacksonian Demo-
crats of the left wing; even farmers did not like to be
cheated by bills founded on little or no specie. Accord-
ingly the cry went up in favor of “notes inflated but sound”
issued by and on the credit of state governments—in spite
of the fact that the Constitution of the United States de-

686 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

clared in words strong and exact: ‘‘No state... shall emit
bills of credit; or make anything but gold and silver coin
a tender in payment of debts.”

Ignoring this clear prohibition Missouri farmers and
planters, pinched for money, decided, as soon as they got
into the Union, that they would make cash with the print-
ing press. On their demand the local legislature pro-
vided in 1821 that the state treasury should issue two hun-
dred thousand dollars worth of certificates in denominations
of not less than fifty cents or more than ten dollars, the said
bills to be distributed among the counties on the basis of
population and lent to the needy on farm mortgages and
personal property. The printing was done and the “‘certifi-
cates’’ were sent on their mission of relief.

Then the authors of the program had to reckon with
John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme
Court, before whose august tribunal the issue finally came.
In the course of time a Missouri debtor, with an ironic
shrug, refused to pay the state government when it at-
tempted to collect from him a loan originally made in its
own notes, alleging in his defense that the issue of the bills
was invalid from the beginning because forbidden by the
federal Constitution. This case being taken to Washing-
ton, the Supreme Court, with Marshall rendering the opin-
ion, sustained the debtor. Scarcely concealing his impa-
tience, the stern old Justice turned a deaf ear to the elo-
quent argument of Senator Benton, who pleaded the cause of
his state; in language that admitted of no ambiguity, Mar-
shall informed the fiat-money party that no state could emit
bills of credit designed to circulate as money on the faith
of the state itself. So the Missouri paper money law was
declared null and void. The chapter was apparently closed.

In fact, however, it was not really closed, for the neigh-
boring state of Kentucky, shrewder in its generation than
Missouri, had discovered a more subtle scheme for issuing
paper money. Its legislature in 1820 established a bank
in the name of the state, chose the directors and president

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 687

of the institution, and authorized the corporation to issue
notes, receive deposits, and make loans on real and personal
property. In due course the validity of this act was ques-
tioned before the Supreme Court, where, at a preliminary
trial, with two members of the tribunal absent, three of the
five judges, Marshall in the lead, concurred in holding the
Kentucky law void because in effect the state was issuing
bills of credit under it. But since three justices did not con-
stitute a majority of the full Court a rehearing was ordered.

When the case came up again, three years afterward,
namely, in 1837, the composition of the bench had been
changed; Marshall had passed from the scene and Jackson’s
stanch friend, Roger B. Taney, had taken his seat. Now
dominated by western and southern men, the Court chose
Justice McLean, a Jackson appointee from Ohio, to write
the opinion in the Kentucky cause. After examining the
statute enacted by his neighbors across the river from Cin-
cinnati, the learned Justice came to the conclusion that, in
spite of Marshall’s declaration, the law did not conflict
with the clause of the Constitution forbidding states to issue
bills of credit. In other words, a state could charter a
bank, hold all its stock, choose its officers, and empower
it to issue notes and lend them to citizens, without impart-
ing to the institution any of the “attributes of sovereignty.”

With an eloquence marked by pathos, Justice Story dis-
sented from this solemn judgment, speaking for himself and
his dear colleague, the late Chief Justice Marshall. Ina
note of despair, Chancellor Kent of New York, on reading
the report of the case, declared that he had lost his “‘con-
fidence and hopes in the constitutional guardianship and pro-
tection of the Supreme Court.” The Constitution remained
just as written by the Fathers but new men were consulting
the auspices. Well might the spiritual heirs of Shays re-
joice in western cornfields. ‘To private banks issuing notes
could now be added state banks engaged in the same
business.

Victorious in the currency field, the party of the easy way

688 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

began to draft bankruptcy laws and other legislation touch-
ing private rights in tender spots. Here, too, fine juridical
points were involved; for it was necessary to take into
account that clause of the federal Constitution which for-
bade states to impair the obligation of contracts. As in-
terpreted by Chief Justice Marshall in the celebrated Dart-
mouth College case of 1819, and other opinions less fa-
mous in the history of constitutional law, those brief words,
broadly speaking, commanded local legislatures never
to repeal charters, land grants, and other privileges once
issued to private persons and corporations, even if corrup-
tion had entered into the original transaction. In the same
spirit, an act of the New York legislature authorizing bank-
rupts to discharge their obligations by turning their assets
over to creditors in due form was declared invalid as to
contracts, notes, and debts made previous to the enactment
of the law.

In the course of time, however, changes in the personnel |
of the Court put Marshall in the minority and, much to his
chagrin, his colleagues in the great tribunal sustained a
bankruptcy law which applied to debts contracted after its
passage. ‘This was a decision of high consequence. Web-
ster, who was of counsel in the case, put the situation in a
nutshell. ‘‘Suppose,”’ he said in his plea, ‘‘a state should
declare, by law, that all contracts entered into thereafter
should be subject to such laws as the legislature, at any time,
or from time to time, might see fit to pass. ‘This law, ac-
cording to the argument, would enter into the contract, be-
come a part of it, and authorize the interference of the
legislative power with it for any and all purposes, wholly
uncontrolled -by the Constitution.’ Nevertheless, with
Marshall vigorously dissenting, the Court declared in effect
that whenever a state specifically reserved to itself the right
to repeal or alter charters and contracts made in the future,
such reservation gave it a free hand, in spite of the clause
forbidding it to impair such obligation.

Quickly grasping the import of this decision, restive states

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 689

cast off another federal shackle. Wisconsin, for example,
in drafting her constitution of 1848 inserted in the article
dealing with corporations the pertinent words: “‘All general
laws or special acts, enacted under the provisions of this
section, may be altered or repealed by the legislature at any
time after their passage.”

Thus, in solemn decisions, Jacksonian judges from agra-
rian states broke down the historic safeguards thrown
around property rights by the letter of the Constitution and
the jurisprudence of John Marshall. For practical pur-
poses they declared the states to be sovereign. So in 1860
the country stood in fundamental respects just where it did
in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. Nothing but
another radical change in the membership of the Supreme
Bench or a constitutional revolution, such as that effected
in 1789, could repair the havoc wrought in business enter-
prise by agrarian actions. ‘This second revolution was to
come—during the storm of war when the Fourteenth
Amendment was forced on the nation by the military power
of a Republican administration.

§

On the states’ rights view of the Constitution, the reduc-
tion of the tariff, the overthrow of the United States Bank,
and a general easing of the currency, Jacksonian Democ-
racy presented a fairly united front at the turn of the half
century, its future seeming to be assured beyond all ques-
tion. However, among the irrepressible issues thrust
upon the country during the middle period by physical fact
was the land question, a partisan ghost that could not be
laid by political verbalism. The immense public domain
was a grim reality, and everybody was interested in its
fate.

As we have seen, farmers and mechanics were determined
‘to have it for themselves without paying anything for it;
manufacturers were afraid of losing their workmen if this

690 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

division was made; and in due time planters came to see in
free states of free farmers a menace to their own supremacy
unless the peril could be offset by acquisitions of new slave
territory. All politicians were deeply enmeshed in the issue.
Senators, Representatives, Judges, and Cabinet officers were
quite commonly engaged in land speculations, watching like
hawks every bill that promised to affect their acquired
rights. Eastern capitalists had a stake in the affair; they
bought large sheaves of the land warrants issued by the
government to soldiers, secured choice sections of the pub-
lic domain, and withdrew their property from the market
in the hope of gain through appreciation. Squatters who
had gone to the frontier and settled upon land without per-
mit or title cried out continuously for measures of relief
and confirmation. Highway, canal, railroad, and land com-
panies, intriguing and lobbying for land grants, managed
to get possession of magnificent principalities, frequently
with the aid of members of Congress who personally
profited from their projects. In the midst of this lively
scramble over the distribution of the national domain tow-
ered one lonely figure of heroic stature, Dorothea Dix,
laboring in vain for years to wring from the federal gov-
ernment an appropriation of land in aid of the insane poor
whose treatment in that period was a disgrace to the United
States.

As time passed, the agitation over free homes for the
landless drowned all other clamor, swelling to proportions
that seemed terrifying to the steersmen at the helm, as
every turbulent element in the seething democracy of
the age became enlisted in it. Summed up in the alluring
slogan, ‘‘Vote yourself a farm,” the creed appealed with
equal force to radical workmen of the eastern cities and
to radical farmers of the Mississippi Valley. Labor cham-
pions found in the Homestead project a solution for the
problem of industrial misery; one of the outstanding agi-
tators of the time, George Henry Evans, a leader in the
National Reform Association, organized meetings, held

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 691

conventions, and rallied the proletariat to the cause. Edi-
tors took it up as a popular movement. German immi-
grants, fleeing from poverty and oppression, added their
pleas to the demands of native Americans. Abolitionists
joined the chorus, for they saw in the advance of inde-
pendent farmers a check on the spread of the slave empire.
Philosophers who pondered on human rights shared in the
hue andcry. “If any man has a right to life,” asserted an
apostle of this school, “he has, by inevitable consequence,
the right to the elements of life, to the earth, the air, and
the water.”

Those who opposed the scheme were denounced as the
enemies of mankind. ‘Both old parties’? were condemned
—charged with being ‘‘in favor of selling the fertile soil to
mercenary wretches who might as well traffic in the life’s
blood of the poor.” ‘Thus the dangerous doctrines of
liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, so men-
acing to the planting order, were invoked in the struggle
over the dispersion of the national domain.

Shortly after the log-cabin and hard-cider campaign of
1840 the homestead agitation, in full force, burst in upon
the floor of Congress and from that time forward the
drumbeat of the land reformers continued the uproar
until an alignment was finally effected. In the process
party ranks were broken to correspond more closely with
the diversified interests of the country, as the Whigs and
the Democrats both split, forecasting the great disruption
just over the horizon. In the House of Representatives,
that branch of the federal government ‘“‘nearest to the peo-
ple,” many Democratic members, especially from the dis-
tricts inhabited largely by independent farmers, voted for
free homesteads when the question first came before them;
in fact, a majority of the southern delegation favored the
project at first. In the Senate, however, where planters
were more powerful, opposition was resolute; it was the
vote of southern statesmen that defeated the homestead
bill of 1852. ‘The South opposes the movement,” wrote

692 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a Whig editor of New York, ‘‘and to our mind correctly
denounces it as a fraud and as a scheme that could proceed
from no other source than demagogism itself.’

Seven years later when the measure in a modified form
was again pressed in Congress, the sectional pattern was
almost perfect, only three southern members in the House
placing themselves on the side of free distribution, while
the whole northern contingent, except for a handful of
Democrats and one Whig, voted solidly for the bill. Once
more southern spokesmen in the Senate were obdurate;
unable to secure the annexation of Cuba to balance free
land in the West, they voted almost unanimously against
the measure sent up by the House.

The result of this deadlock was a compromise which
fixed a small price for homesteads and provided that, at
the expiration of thirty years, any land remaining unsold
should be ceded to the states. This measure, largely
engineered by Andrew Johnson, the agrarian Democrat
from Tennessee, was finally carried through Congress in
1860 by large majorities, to the delight of agitators; but
it was killed in the White House by President Buchanan.
Ignoring the pleas of the left wing, the President vetoed
the Homestead bill, declaring in defense of his action that it
would deprive the nation of a valuable heritage, “‘go far
to demoralize the people,’ and perhaps “introduce among
us those pernicious social theories which have proved so
disastrous in other countries.”’

Thus a Democratic executive, who had on other occa-
sions indicated his sympathy for the planting faction of his
party, defeated an economic project resolutely backed by
Democratic farmers and workingmen of the North and
West. Already a third Republican party, bearing the name
of Jefferson’s old agricultural interest, had accepted the
challenge and was rousing the masses with the new slogan,
“Vote yourself a farm,” while rallying the manufacturers
with a kindred cry, ‘“‘Vote yourself a protective tariff.”
The hour for the transfer of the public domain to private

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 693

persons without compensation and the creation of protec-
tive safeguards for American industry was at hand.

§

In this clash of forces the two prevailing labor systems
of the country—free and slave—inevitably became in-
volved. From the beginning, as already noted, the plant-
ing statesmen looked upon the working classes of the in-
dustrial cities, in their struggle for power in the govern-
ment, as a menace to the social order, no matter how much
they rejoiced to receive the votes of mechanics. The Jeffer-
sonian fear of the ‘‘mobs of the great cities,’’ widely spread
among the leaders of the South, had every appearance of
being genuine. In the growing strength of an educated
white proletariat they saw, or thought they saw, a rising
peril to property, liberty, and the Constitution. Again and
again, with tireless emphasis, they asserted that belief
upon the floor of Congress. ‘They did more than that;
they insisted that the system of Negro slavery was not only
safer to ruling classes but, considered in terms of humanity, —
superior to that of wage labor. In any event such was their
official creed even though they gladly made use of the
northern proletariat to defeat the party of Hamilton and
Webster. In the taunt of John Randolph: “Northern gen-
tlemen think to govern us by our black slaves; but let me
tell them, we intend to govern them by their white slaves.”

Of the many philosophers who expounded this doctrine,
none displayed more dialectics than Senator Hammond of
South Carolina. ‘In all social systems,’’ he said, ‘‘there
must be a class to do the mean duties, to perform the
drudgery of life. . . . Such a class you must have or you
would not have that other class which leads to progress,
refinement and civilization. . . . We call them slaves. We
are old-fashioned at the South yet; it is a word discarded
now by ears polite; I will not characterise that class at the
North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is every-

694 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

where; it is eternal. . . . [he difference between us is that
our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is
no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among
our people, and not too much employment either. Yours
are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compen-
sated, which may be proved in the most deplorable man-
ner, at any hour in any street of your large towns... .
Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power.
Yours do vote and being the majority, they are the deposi-
taries of all your political power. If they knew the tre-
mendous secret that the ballot box is stronger than any
army with bayonets, and could combine, where would you
be? Your society would be reconstructed, your govern-
ment reconstructed, your property divided. . . . You have
been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How
would you like for us to send lecturers or agitators North
to teach these people this, to aid and assist them in com-
bining, and to lead them?”

On the other side of the line an equally vigorous indict-
ment was formulated against slavery—the economic foun-
dation of the planting class. Like Jefferson’s antipathy
for the urban ‘“‘mobocracy,” opposition to human bond-
age was as old as the republic. Many of the founding
Fathers from the South as well as the North regretted the
existence of slavery in the United States and hoped that
the day of its disappearance would come somehow in the
course of events.

After that generation had passed, Harriet Martineau,
the English critic who traveled widely through the southern
states in 1835, recorded that, in all her conversations with
planters, she found only one who defended the system with-
out reservations. About the same time the Virginia legis-
lature seriously debated the issue of emancipation, many of
the members indulging in the severest criticism of chattel
servitude. ‘Slavery in the abstract,’ exclaimed Senator
Benton of Missouri, a slave state, ‘Shas but few advocates or
defenders in the slave-holding states.” It was the seem-

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 695

ingly insuperable difficulties inherent in the problem of free-
ing slaves, rather than ethical and religious teachings, that .
afforded the best defense which the early spokesmen of
slavery could advance.

And deeds spoke louder than words, From the founda-
tion of the republic there had been an unmistakable display
of good faith on the part of those who disliked slavery.
Its exclusion from the Northwest Territory in 1787, the
abolition of the slave trade in 1808, and the formation of
colonization societies to encourage emancipation by the re-
turn of slaves to Africa were all signs that the system of
human bondage fretted the conscience of statesmen and pri--
vate individuals. It is true that the territory south of the
Ohio was opened to slavery, that some of the opposition
to the slave trade came from the breeders of Negroes who
wanted to shut off foreign competition, and that many
advocates of colonization really desired to get rid of free
Negroes whose presence among slaves was not conducive
to order.

Yet running through all these movements was a sincere
desire to curtail the area of slavery. Even a better evi-
dence of this sentiment was to be found in the Missouri
Compromise, by which many southern leaders, bending be-
fore strong pressure from the North, agreed to surrender
the bulk of the Louisiana territory to freedom. Indeed,
it was not until the full effects of the revolution wrought by
textile machinery were felt in the planting states, not until
the northern attack on southern economic policies was
launched all along the line, that opposition to slavery prac-
tically disappeared among the statesmen of the cotton belt.

Naturally it was in the North where the value of slavery
was slight that hostility to the institution—often mingled
with hostility to the political economy of the planters—took —
the firmer root and flourished with the greater vitality. As
early as 1775, before the battle of Lexington and Concord
was fought, there was founded in Pennsylvania, under the
presidency of Benjamin Franklin, a Society for Promot-

696 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ing the Abolition of Slavery, followed by the formation
of similar organizations in other northern states and in
Maryland. In 1794 these societies held a national con-
vention, the first of a series assembled at more or less regu-
lar intervals for about a quarter of a century. Their dis-
cussions, however, were rather platonic and, after slavery
was abolished in the northern states, their proceedings
evoked no serious interest on the part of the public. It was
not until the middle period when the economic struggle be-
tween the sections grew tense that the agitation against
slavery became relentless and virulent.

It was in 1831, just a year before South Carolina threat-
ened to leave the Union on account of the tariff of abomina-
tions, that William Lloyd Garrison issued from his press
in Boston the first copy of a belligerent anti-slavery paper,
The Liberator. Two forerunners had broken the path but
they had been mild in comparison. The Emancipator,
founded in 1820 at Jonesborough, Tennessee, by Elihu —
Embree, a Quaker of radical tendencies, had expired with-
out making more than a ripple in public complacency.
Neither did a second venture, called The Genius of Uni-
versal Emancipation, started in the summer of 1821 by an-
other Quaker, Benjamin Lundy, ring a militant alarm bell.
But Garrison, a man of different temper, had iron in his
soul. He had been in prison in Baltimore for writing an
article for Lundy’s paper alleging that a certain New Eng-
land merchant had allowed one of his ships to be used in
carrying slaves down the coast, and while within the gloomy
walls of his jail had meditated on powers and principalities.
There he reached a high resolve, and on his release, hur-
ried swiftly back to Massachusetts where, with a shrill cry
of impatience, he issued The Liberator from a dingy back
room in Boston.

Now an editor on his own account, Garrison broke away
from the mild program of Lundy, taking his stand squarely
in favor of ‘immediate and unconditional emancipation’’
and openly confessing repentance for having once accepted

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 697

“the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual emancipa-
tion.” His creed simple, his language as imperious as the
declamations of the ancient prophets, he contended that
slavery was ‘‘a crime—a damning crime’’. and hence that
all slaveholders were criminals and their supporters par-
takers of their guilt. No person or institution was great
enough to escape his passionate criticisms. Webster, Clay,
Calhoun, all statesmen and politicians, high and low, who
defended slavery, espoused compromises, or sought to avoid
the issue came in for a full measure of his scathing abuse.
To him the Constitution was no sacred parchment; it was
a slave-owners’ document—a ‘covenant with death and an
-agreement with hell.” Day and night Garrison cried aloud
that “slavery must go!”

And yet he had no definite scheme for realizing his aim,
no method of politics or organization. ' He did not attempt
to marshal voters at the polls; neither did he preach revo-
lution. Indeed he had little interest in politics and on prin-
ciple he was bitterly opposed to violence, believing rather
in the doctrine of non-resistance. Just one consuming idea
possessed him: slavery is a crime. Just one message
poured from his soul: slavery must be abolished. On all
mankind he served notice that he would plow his furrow to
the end: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will
not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be
heard.”

Soon a band of adherents, men and women, as severe and
uncompromising as he, rallied around the Garrison banner.
Wendell Phillips, of a fine old New England family, laid
aside all plans for a reputable career to devote his consum-
mate arts as an orator and agitator to the cause of emanci-
pation. The Quaker poet, Whittier, turned his craft to
framing indictments that meted out rhythmic damnation to
slavery and politicians allied with it. In poem and in prose,
satire and argument, James Russell Lowell held up to scorn
the defenders of “our peculiar institution.”’ Emerson
added the weighty words of the philosopher to the cutting

698 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

observations of the good hater. In 1852, Harriet Beecher

Stowe dramatized the abolitionist creed in a novel, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which stirred the emotions of multitudes that
had never read a political speech or heard a serious debate
on any theme.

In arousing public sentiment every known instrument was
utilized by the agitators. Local anti-slavery societies were
formed and then federated into a national organization.
Quakers, inspired by the teachings of Elias Hicks, inveighed
against cotton broking and dealing in the products of slave
labor, opening shops where ‘‘free goods” could be bought.
Petitions denouncing human bondage were circulated by the
thousands, signed, and showered upon Congress for the
purpose of forcing debates there. Papers and tracts were
widely distributed, eventhroughthe post offices of the South.
References to slavery agitation were slipped into textbooks
and popular works—much -to the distress of editors and
school trustees below the Potomac. Pressure was brought
to bear upon northern legislatures to wring from them
measures favorable to the cause, especially ‘“‘personal liberty
laws,” granting to fugitive slaves the right of trial by jury,
forbidding the use of local jails by slave catchers, and im-
posing heavy penalties on persons who tried to carry free
Negroes into servitude.

Not satisfied with appealing to opinion and to law, many
anti-slavery leaders, turning from words to deeds, laid out
routes, known as underground railways, along which they
spirited slaves from the South to safety in the North or in
Canada. Advancing a step further, they occasionally
organized mobs to rescue fugitives who were being carried
back to bondage by their masters. In short, every con-
ceivable agency was employed to arouse an undying hatred
for slavery and the owners of slaves. If some of the agi-
tators tried to keep the campaign on a high level of ethics
and argument, others descended to the depths of abuse and
scurrility.

The sources of this remarkable movement are difficult to

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 699

discover. Westermarck, in two huge volumes devoted to
the history of moral ideas, gives no clue to the inspiration
of such a crusade. Unquestionably, most of the men and
women prominent in the anti-slavery agitation were deeply
religious and made constant use of the teachings of Jesus in
their appeals for support; Embree and Lundy were
Quakers; Garrison was a Baptist in faith, if not in church
membership. And yet on the other side were millions of
Christians who saw in human bondage nothing inconsistent
with their creed, who used the same Scriptures with equal
zest in defence of the institution. Again, the abolition-
ists were also fond of appealing to Jefferson and the Dec-
laration of Independence as their authority, but they could
claim no monopoly in that sphere; for the last bulwark of
slavery was found in the Democratic party, which professed
to represent in politics the humanity of Jefferson.

Nor was sacrificial benevolence a controlling force in the
abolition crusade. Indeed, the defenders of slavery taunted
the agitators with calling for concessions at the expense of
other people, and with a show of reason. Certainly the
abolition movement was confined almost entirely to the
North where there were no slaves to emancipate; the hand-
ful of southerners, such as the Grimké sisters, who freed
their bondmen and dedicated themselves to Garrison’s
cause, merely offering exceptions that proved the rule. The
only scathing indictment of slavery that came from the
South after the agitation had reached serious proportions
—The Impending Crisis by Hinton Rowan Helper—was
penned by a man whom slave owners branded with the
odious term of “poor white.” And yet, conceding that the
abolition cry appealed mainly to those who had nothing to
lose by the revolution, it remained a fact that devotion to
the creed sprang largely from sentiments of a moral nature.

How deeply this agitation went and how many people
were really stirred by it can hardly be determined. Accord-
ing to all available figures the smoke was larger than the
fire. One historian of the movement estimated that at the

700 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

height of the struggle there were in the whole country about
two thousand anti-slavery societies with approximately two
hundred thousand members. Another reckoning placed the
number of petitioners who signed the anti-slavery docu-
ments, presented by John Quincy Adams to the House of
Representatives, at three hundred thousand. But when
some of the abolitionists, greatly overrating their strength,
entered the political field in 1844 with their Liberty party,
they could muster only sixty-five thousand recruits from
among the two and a half million voters who cast their bal-
lots in that election. That was America’s answer to a
direct call for abolition and, now fully apprised of their
voting strength, the advocates of the doctrine never again
ventured to present a candidate to the suffrages of their
countrymen.

In other words, immediate and unconditional emancipa-
tion as the rallying cry for a political party was from the
beginning to the end a total failure, If, therefore, the
realization of the abolition program had depended on the
capture of a majority of the voters, if other factors than
moral education had not intervened, the agitators might
have waged a forlorn battle indefinitely. In any event,
twenty years after Garrison launched The Liberator, the
Democratic party on a positive pro-slavery platform car-
ried every state in the Union except four; and that was in
1852, many months after the appearance of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, which filled the country with the turbulence of de-
bate. ‘‘It deepens the horror of slavery,’ wrote Ticknor
of that novel, ‘‘but it does not change a single vote.”’ The
balloting seemed to warrant his assertion.

Nevertheless it appears that the influence of the aboli-
tion agitation far outran the measurements that were taken
at the polls. Within six years after Garrison hoisted his
flag in Boston, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary—_
not for immediate political purposes—these revealing
words: “The public mind in my own district and state is
convulsed between the slavery and abolition questions, and

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 701

I walk on the edge of a precipice in every step that I take.”’
In the same year, 1837, Webster openly declared that the
anti-slavery feeling was not to be “‘trifled with or despised.”’
In the Senate, his southern colleague, Calhoun, professed to
be deeply frightened by it, making in reply, two years later,
his famous speech in defense of slavery which called for an
unconditional suppression of the abolition agitation as the
price of continued Union.

If some were inclined to discount such alarms as mere
political effervescence, the fact remained that in several
northern states where the parties were fairly equal a few
voters held the balance of power and on various occasions
exercised their prerogative with deadly effect. In the elec-
tion of 1844, for instance, the anti-slavery candidate, by
taking a few thousand votes away from Clay, the Whig
leader, gave the presidency to James K. Polk of Tennessee,
spokesman of the Democracy. Continually haunted by fear
of such schisms, politicians bent on the possession of office
and power had to be careful lest a tiny minority of agitators
throw their entire national machine out of gear. |

‘So, after all, the abolitionists did not have to muster a
conquering host to frighten the managers of party affairs
and to advance their own designs. By little threats, they
forced many a Whig candidate out into the open and in
turn helped to consolidate all wavering forces in the South
behind a single banner—safety to slavery. At the same
time they compelled many a northern Democrat to speak
softly on the excellence of “‘the peculiar institution’? when
he would fain have rallied whole-heartedly to his southern
’ brethren. In a word, the fortunes of politics often hung
upon the maneuvers of a “‘contemptible minority.”

And yet it must not be supposed that even the opponents
of slavery were solidly united in their creed or in their
strategy. The reverse was true: they were divided among
themselves into innumerable factions. On the right wing
were sentimentalists who regretted the existence of the
institution but thought that little could be done to mitigate

702 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

its evils or remove it. On the left were Garrison’s invin-
cibles who condemned bondage as a crime and were pre-
pared to abandon the Constitution and declare the Union
dissolved to get rid of it.

Between these extremes were all shades of opinion. A
large number of people were merely opposed to the exten-
sion of slavery into the new territories—a policy that
seemed both humane and practicable since Congress had
proclaimed freedom in the Northwest in 1787 and the north-
ern part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1820 and a further
application of accepted doctrine could be readily made. A
smaller number, hostile to slavery everywhere on principle,
yet hoping that planters could be persuaded to listen to the
voice of sweet reason and accept compensation in return for
emancipation, suggested that the revenues from the sale
of public lands be devoted to this purpose.

Perhaps the major portion of all those who in their
hearts disliked slavery were bewildered by the complex
character of every solution offered. Lincoln himself, even
though in his later years he fought consistently for freedom
in the territories, could see no way to emancipation until a
crisis forced a decision upon him. Nor is this a matter for
wonder. The four million slaves represented a property
interest amounting to billions of dollars, ramifying in every
direction through the whole planting system and through
numerous industrial and commercial activities that rested
upon servile labor—involving the North almost as much as
the South in its economic net.

Moreover, for the politician who respected established
law there were insuperable obstacles in the path of abolli-
tion; for under the Constitution the national government
had no authority whatever over slavery in the states where
it already existed. And if emancipation came, what could
be done with the four million slaves themselves? What
civil, economic, political rights were to be given them on
the morrow of liberty? Practical men simply could not
visualize the fiscal and administrative measures necessary to

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 703

effect such an enormous social revolution. Perhaps most
practical men gave little or no thought to the finalities of
the issue. If they felt in their bones that a crisis was ahead,
they were in any case powerless to prevent the storm; and
in the days to come the little plots and plans which they
had evolved were tossed aside as the toys of children. In
the economy of Providence, as the orators were fond of
saying, abolition agitators were to be justified by history,
not by the work of their own hands or by any of the political
instruments they had forged.

§

On the planters the immediate effect of the anti-slavery
clangor was a consolidation of forces and a searching of
minds and hearts for an effective answer. Clearly the hour
for apologetics had arrived and human intelligence was
equal to the occasion. In the long history of defense
mechanisms, there is no chapter more fascinating than that
which recounts the rise and growth of the extraordinary
system of ethics which, at the very height of the slave
power, formed the moral bulwark of its established order.

The system did not, of course, spring full blown from
the brain of any single thinker. It was the work of many
minds, separate departments being added from year to
year under the stress of attack from without and the
pressure of fusion within. At length it was finished—an
exhaustive compendium of historical, legal, constitutional,
economic, religious, ethical, and philosophical arguments in
support of slavery, a vast and intricate body of logic suf-
fused with the glow of righteous sincerity and adorned
with gems of classical eloquence—a ready and inspiring
guide capable of sustaining those troubled by doubts and
fortifying combatants on the firing line of politics. Repre-
sentatives in Congress, newspaper editors in their sanctums,
clergymen in their pulpits, professors in the institutions of
learning, and political leaders ranging from national figures

704 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

down to village politicians now had at their tongues’ tips
a reply to every attack, a foil for every thrust. By the irony
of fate the great argument reached its perfection at the
very moment when the economic class for which it provided
moral assurance had passed the peak of its power and, un-
known to its defenders, was tottering on the brink of doom.

On the economic side, the case for slavery was formulated
by Calhoun in a powerful speech delivered in the Senate of
the United States in 1839 with the precision and solemnity
that marked all his great utterances. Advancing to the
fray, lance in hand, Calhoun flung out the assertion that
slavery, in the existing state of society, was not an evil
but ‘“‘a good—a positive good,” a startling proposition
which he sustained by two contentions.

First, the slaves had been brought from Africa ‘‘in a low,
degraded, savage condition’ and in the course of a few
generations had been raised “‘to a comparatively civilized
condition” under “the fostering care of our institutions.”’
To this he added a second theorem even more fatalistic.
In every civilized society, the bearers of culture must live
upon the labor of others; this has always been true; it is
still true; modes of exploitation merely differ. Under the
“subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern times,”’
the person who works for wages is exploited more severely
than the chattel laborer, and then, in time of sickness, unem-
ployment, and old age, he is committed to the tender mercies
of the streets or of the almshouse. On the other hand,
less is exacted from the slave and a solicitous attention is
paid him in sickness and the infirmities of years. ‘‘Compare
his condition,”’ exclaimed Calhoun, ‘‘with the tenants of the
poorhouses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look
at the sick, and the old and infirm slave on the one hand,
in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind super-
intending care of his master and mistress and compare it
with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in
the poorhouse.”’ .

No. less imposing was the political case for slavery.

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 705

Having demonstrated to their satisfaction the excellence
of their economic system and the superiority of slave over
wage labor, defenders of the institution argued that the
relation established between master and servant in their
section formed ‘‘the most solid and durable foundation upon
which to rear free and stable political institutions,” to use
Calhoun’s phrasing. This thesis was unfolded in a neat
chain of reasoning: the slaves are of another race; they
are kept in ignorance and take no part in government; they
do not expect to improve their lot and are affected by no
social ferment; they are widely scattered on lonely planta-
tions and cannot be welded into unions for revolt. Thus
the repose of the existing order is assured and the Constitu-
tion of the United States is afforded a stable economic bul-
wark; the “monstrous doctrine of equality’ now making
dangerous progress and threatening the security of private
property throughout the civilized world meets in the South
invulnerable barriers.

To the inescapable logic of economic and political science
was added the authority of religion. While discussing ‘‘the
moral aspect of this institution” in 1858 a southern member
of Congress declared that slavery had the blessing of God
and the Bible as well as of the Constitution and profane
history. ‘‘We learn from the Holy Scriptures,’ exclaimed
the orator, “that Abraham and many wise and good men of
that day not only held slaves but exercised acts of owner-
ship over them; and that God Himself, after he had rescued
the children of Israel from the house of bondage, sanctioned
and recognized slavery both in principle and in practice.
In defining the rules for their government and their moral
observance, it was prescribed that ‘Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s man-servant nor his maid-servant nor anything
that is thy neighbor’s.’ Thus, sir, not only sanctioning slav-
ery but providing for its protection for all time to come.”

In the same vein a Virginia member of the House of
Representatives, after a detailed presentation of the theo-
logical argument, summed up the whole case of morals and

706 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

religion in a moving peroration: “I believe that the insti-
tution of slavery is a noble one; that it is necessary for the
good, the well-being of the Negro race. Looking into
history, I go further and say, in the presence of this assem-
bly and under all the imposing circumstances surrounding
me that I believe it is God’s institution. Yes, sir, if there
is anything in the action of the great Author of us all; if
there is anything in the conduct of His chosen people; if
there is anything in the conduct of Christ Himself who came
upon this earth and yielded His life as a sacrifice that all
through His death might live; if there is anything in the
conduct of His apostles who inculcated obedience on the
part of slaves towards their masters as a Christian duty,
then we must believe that the institution is from God.”
This was both comprehensive and emphatic.

Although the “‘new psychology” had not yet risen above
the intellectual horizon to contribute its decoration to the
teachings of economics, politics, history, and religion, a
Swedenborgian clergyman set forth “The Spiritual Philos-
ophy” of bondage in the terminology of his sect. “By
African slavery the sensual-corporeal principle of the Afri-
can,” he said, “‘is brought into obedience and subjection to
the natural or scientific plane of the white man’s life. The
white man wills and thinks for him, determines his outgo-
ings and his incomings, his food, his clothing, his sleep, his
work, etc. . . . What is the result? His sensual-corporeal
is adjusted as a servant to the regenerate natural of the
white man and receives influx through it. His hereditary
torpor is dissipated; the sphere of order, justice, and active
use into which he is inserted is repugnant to his attendant
evil spirits and they measurably leave him. . . . He is
passing through the process which Almighty God has pro-
vided and which will eventuate in his true liberty and his
final salvation. ‘Bonds make free, so they be righteous

bonds.’ ”
§

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 707

Those who resisted the agitation of the abolitionists did
not confine themselves to arguments. Like their opponents,
they seized upon all the weapons of law and custom, going
occasionally beyond social peace—to violence and intimida-
tion. When petitions for the abolition of slavery and the
slave trade in the District of Columbia began to shower
upon the House of Representatives like autumn leaves, in
1836, a member from Georgia proposed to reject them all,
thus simply denying the ancient right of petition accorded
by the express language of the American Constitution.
After an impassioned debate a resolution known as the
“gag rule’ was carried, condemning slavery agitation and
providing that petitions referring to the subject be tabled
at once without consideration. ‘Though this restraint on
civil liberty was later removed from the records of the
House on the insistent demand of John Quincy Adams, it
betrayed a firm determination on the part of southerners
to brook no interference with their peculiar institution, at
any peril to constitutional forms.

In their own section where, of course, they had a free
hand, the champions of slavery took even stronger measures
in their efforts to stamp out propaganda. Defying the law,
southern postmasters made a common practice of destroying
abolition literature sent through the mails. Frightened by
the specter of servile revolts, a number of states forbade
the printing and distribution of attacks on slavery, Louisi-
ana, for one, providing that persons guilty of this
offense should be either imprisoned for life or put to death.
With an eye to protecting the young, guardians of the estab-
lished order also scrutinized school texts and other publi-
cations that came from the North and from foreign coun-
tries. In Appleton’s dusty collection of facts, known as
A Complete Guide of the World, one self-appointed in-
spector of public safety found “hidden lessons of the most
fiendish and murderous character that enraged fanaticism
could conceive or indite.”” ‘To warn the unsophisticated,
lists of dangerous books were compiled and published.

708 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

In the North, where abolitionists naturally carried on
most of their work, the ordinary engines of resistance to
criticism were supplemented by mob action. Garrison was
beaten and dragged through the streets of Boston in 1835
by a maddened crowd, “‘including many gentlemen of prop-
erty and influence,” and escaped death only because the
police seized him and put him into jail. One of his dis-
ciples, the Reverend Samuel May, was set upon at least
six times in Massachusetts and Vermont. In Philadelphia,
an attack on the abolitionists assumed the proportions of a
riot. At Alton, Illinois, Lovejoy, a preacher and publisher,
after suffering the loss of three presses at the hands of a
mob, was shot to death while attempting to protect the
fourth.

Such rioting, instead of meeting universal condemnation,
was generally greeted by respectable people as acts of hero-
ism directed against obnoxious pests who deserved death
for disturbing the public and for abusing the grand states-
men of the time. Senator Benton of Missouri rejoiced that
mobs had “‘silenced the gabbling tongues of female dupes
and dispersed the assemblages whether fanatical, visionary,
or incendiary.’’ Before a great crowd in Faneuil Hall, the
attorney-general of Massachusetts compared the Illinois
mob that shot Lovejoy with the patriot Fathers who made
up the Boston Tea Party and branded the victim as a
“‘Dbresumptuous and imprudent”? man who had “‘died as the
fool dieth.”’ In fact all over the North the tactics of the
abolitionists called forth denunciation and deeds of ven-
geance—an efficient counter-reformation. It is highly ques-
tionable whether they gained any important numerical
strength after the uproar of the first decade that followed
the establishment of The Liberator. Indeed, with a show
of justification, the more confident statesmen referred to
their activities as ‘‘a rub-a-dub” agitation.

§

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 709

But the slavery question, as we have seen, did not stand
alone. Leaders among the planters not only wanted to
conserve their labor supply. They also wanted free trade,
or at least tariff for revenue only. They opposed a national
bank and a national currency system built upon such an insti-
tution, they assailed ship subsidies, and they were generally
against internal improvements designed to add to the ties
binding the farming West with the commercial East.
Declaring that the western territories ‘bought by common
blood and treasure’? should be open to slave owners and
their bondmen as well as to farmers, they objected to the
free distribution of the public domain among the landless—
the peopling of new states with inhabitants not attached to
the planting interest. Relying upon the mandate of the
Constitution, they demanded a return of all fugitive slaves
that fled to the North.

So while southern statesmen might speak with constitu-
tional warrant of slavery as ‘‘a local institution solely within
the sovereign power of the state,’’ they were in fact them-
selves aggressively operating in the theater of national poli-
tics, and in their forward drive they accumulated a host of
enemies who cared little or nothing about slavery itself.
Many an orator who might have forgiven the South for
maintaining a servile labor system could not forgive it for
its low tariff doctrines and its opposition to centralized
finance.

By forces more potent than abolition agitation, slavery
was therefore swept along with vital economic issues into
the national vortex at Washington. ‘The institution itself,
though under the control of the states, had many points of
contact, under the Constitution, with the processes of the
federal government. The importation of Negroes was sub-
ject to the control of Congress; it had been abolished in
1808 but the enforcement of the law was vested in the
President of the United States, who could be either strict
or lenient in his methods. Congress had power to make
all needful rules and regulations for the government of the

710 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

territories, the District of Columbia, the forts, and other
lands belonging to the United States; in enacting laws for
these regions it was compelled to decide whether slavery
should exist in them. ‘The admission of new states was
entrusted to Congress; whenever a territory knocked at
the door of the Union, the question of prohibiting or per-
mitting slavery had to be squarely faced by the politicians
of all schools.

Under the Constitution, slaves escaping from their mas-
ters and fleeing into other states were to be returned; Con-
gress had the power to provide for enforcement of this rule.
The postoffice was a federal institution; Congress, having
the right to say what mail matter should be carried, was
forced to consider projects for excluding abolition literature
from the mails. Finally, the First Amendment to the Con-
stitution, guaranteeing to citizens the right to petition, a
right inherent in all free governments, gave the abolitionists
express warranty for laying before Congress anti-slavery
appeals of every character.

Hence, the restriction of slavery to the sphere of state
politics was in fact as impossible as its isolation for consid-
eration on intrinsic merits. Slavery was but one element,
and if the number of abolitionists is any evidence, a minor
element, in the sweep of political and economic forces that
occupied the attention of statesmen throughout the middle
period and finally brought on the irrepressible conflict.

§

By means of argument and bargain, for threescore years
and more, representatives of the North and the South were
able to make peaceable adjustments among the antagonistic
groups in the American Union. ‘The Constitution itself,
as all the world knew, represented an exchange of conces-
sions and guarantees. Under its beneficent shelter, the

owners of slave property received ample protection in return |

for favors to northern merchants, financiers, and manufac-

THE POLITICS OF \THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 711

turers. The continuance of slavery in the states was im-
plicitly allowed; certainly Congress was given no power
to meddle with the institution. Fugitive slaves were to be
returned to their masters and three-fifths of the bondmen
were to be counted as inhabitants in apportioning repre-
sentatives in Congress among the several states.

It was not without some authority, therefore, that abo-
litionists spoke of the Constitution as ‘‘a slave-holder’s docu-
ment” and southerners boasted of the recognition which it
accorded to their interests. As a matter of fact, it was a
treaty of peace between the commercial and planting states.
And the generation that made it showed the same spirit
of accommodation in deciding the fate of the western ter-
ritories: the Northwest being dedicated to freedom and
the region below the Ohio opened to slavery.

A quarter of a century later, after slavery had been
abolished in the original states north of Delaware, a similar
facility for adjustment led the way to a peaceful settlement
of another fierce dispute. In 1818 the territory of Mis-
souri sought membership as a state in the Union—with
slavery as a matter of course since the institution had been
tolerated in that region from the early days of the French
settlement. On the very threshold, the applicant was
greeted in the House of Representatives by a proposal
that no new slaves should be permitted to enter Missouri
after the act of admission and that all slaves subsequently
born there should be ultimately set free.

A deadlock ensued. The South, having half the Senators,
could prevent the passage of this plan for the restriction of
slavery and the North, commanding a majority in the
House, could keep Missouri out of the Union. Only after
a long and stormy debate, which filled the aged Jefferson
with anxiety for the safety of his country, was the Gordian
knot cut: Maine, separated from the parent state of Massa-
chusetts, was admitted as a free state and Missouri with
her slaves. In connection with this settlement it was agreed
that the rest of the vast Louisiana territory north of the

712 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
parallel of 36° 30’, like the old Northwest, should be for-

ever free, while the southern portion, relatively small in
extent, should be by implication open to slavery.

With this adjustment the extremists of neither party
were satisfied. Brusque old John Randolph called it ‘“‘a
dirty bargain,” sneered at its northern supporters as ‘‘dough
faces,’ and mustered a large contingent to vote against it
in the last ditch. Unbending critics of slavery, on their part
—some of them especially concerned with maintaining the
relative power of the Northeast in the Union—looked upon
the settlement as an abject surrender to the South. But the
leaders pledged to the middle course prevented a crisis.
Without a dissenting voice, the members of Monroe’s Cabi-
net, which included Calhoun of South Carolina, Wirt of
Maryland, and Crawford of Georgia, agreed to the ex-
clusion of slavery from the northern portion of the Louisi-
ana territory, displaying a conciliatory temper that augured
well for the balance of power.

The next collision between the commercial and the plant-
ing states, the nullification battle of 1833, did not involve
slavery at all but merely the protective tariff so insistently
demanded by manufacturing interests, wool growers, and
hemp raisers. As we have said, it came nearer disrupting
the nation than the battle over the Missouri question a
decade before. In fact South Carolina prepared to leave
the Union and the federal government made ready to use
force against her to prevent secession, creating an emergency
which was only resolved by the strenuous efforts of moderate
men.

For nearly two decades the conflict of economic sections
evoked no disturbing crisis. Then suddenly it again reached
an acute stage with the shifting of the political scenery by
the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and the
acquisition of additional territory stretching to the Pacific
coast. The signal for this new test of strength was given
on August 6, 1846, a few months after the armed contest
with Mexico began, when David Wilmot, a Democratic

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 713

farmer of Pennsylvania, introduced in the House of Repre-
sentatives a resolution declaring that slavery should be
entirely excluded from any territory which might be seized
in the struggle—a resolution that was to become famous
in American history as the Wilmot Proviso. ‘In the pres-
ence of the living God,” cried Robert Toombs of Georgia,
‘if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the terri-
tories of California and New Mexico . . . I am for dis-
union.”’

The Proviso was voted down but, on the very mention of
slavery in connection with the new possessions, a tempest
swept the country. Abolitionists insisted that the Mexican
War was nothing but a slave owners’ scheme to get more
land for cotton and bondage. Statesmen of the planting
interest replied that it was an insult to deny them the fruits
of a joint struggle in which the South had given its full
portion of blood and treasure to punish the common enemy
and sustain the national honor.

Like many others, this fresh battle of wits might have
remained academic had it not been for the fact that, at the
close of the Mexican War, arrangements of some kind
simply had to be made for the government of the territories
newly acquired. Accordingly when Congress met in Decem-
ber, 1849, a verbal battle royal on this issue opened and
continued to rage throughout the winter, transfixing the
nation. In every way the debate was a memorable forensic
contest worthy of a place in the annals of oratory beside
the noblest intellectual tourneys of ancient and modern
times. It was significant on account of the men who par-
ticipated, the eloquence and cogency of their arguments, and
the results that flowed from their deliberations.

Three masters, gray and bowed with some forty years of
labor in the forum, dominated the scene: Calhoun from the
Far South, Webster from the Far North, and Clay from
the borderland. ‘The first of them was destined to die
before the grand argument came tu anend. ‘The last, bent
with the weight of more than seventy years, had every

714 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

reason to believe that his ambitions were at rest and that
the veil of the dark portal was soon to part for him.
Webster, to all appearances stronger in body and perhaps
yet able to grasp the presidency, on which his heart was set,
even so was soon to follow his colleagues to the grave.
Around the masters were ranged the men of the younger
generation who were to hear the tramp of marching armies
and to lead contending forces through the four years of
war that followed the failure of reason and eloquence.

For the planting interest, Calhoun issued the challenge
and laid down the terms on which his section would remain
in the Union. He opened by explaining the reasons for
southern anxiety in the crisis. One of these was of course
the long continued agitation of the slavery question in the
North. But ‘the great and primary cause’ of southern
fears—lying behind the slavery issue and ‘‘intimately”’ con-
nected with it—was the indubitable fact that the North
through its amazing growth had now acquired ‘‘the ex-
clusive power of controlling the government,’’ whereas the
South was without ‘‘adequate means of protecting itself
against its encroachment and oppression.”’ In other words,
the delicate balance of former days was gone; the com-
mercial and farming states could, if they would, hence-
forward dominate and oppress the planting states.

With his wonted logical exactness Calhoun then presented
his ultimatum: the South was to have an equal right of way
in all territories; the North was faithfully to fulfill the
provisions for the return of fugitive slaves; the agitation
of the slavery question was to cease; and finally there was
to be an amendment to the Constitution restoring the
equilibrium between the sections and giving the planting
states security against the weight of northern majorities—
an echo of the central idea of the Hartford Convention just
reversed. His statement was clear and explicit—and his-
torically impossible.

For the younger generation peering into the future, for
the wing of the extreme left, spoke William H. Seward of

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 715

New York. He too was clear and explicit: slavery agita-
tion would not cease. ‘‘Has any government ever succeeded
in changing the moral convictions of its subjects?’ he
inquired. The fugitive slave law could not be enforced;
the overwhelming weight of public sentiment in the North
was against it. The territories would not be surrendered
to slavery but consecrated to justice, welfare, and liberty.
“There is a higher law than the Constitution,” vowed the
orator, ‘which regulates our authority over the domain and
devotes it to the same noble purposes’’—a battle tocsin
which gave cold chills to lawyers who believed that life was
encompassed by the walls of jurisprudence.

Having defied Calhoun on every point, Seward boldly
declared to his astounded auditors that ‘‘emancipation is
inevitable and is near; that it may be hastened or hindered;
and that whether it shall be peaceful or violent depends
upon the question whether it be hastened or hindered; that
all measures which fortify slavery or extend it tend to the
consummation of violence; all that check its extension and
abate its strength tend to its peaceful extirpation.”

Into this wide breach Clay flung himself with a compro-
mise, the last of his distinguished career. By powerful
speeches and skillful negotiations he labored to rally mod-
erate men to a program of harmony that offered concessions
to both extremes. A note of moving pathos ran through
every plea that he made for freedom and slavery protected
by the Constitution, for compromise as the only alternative
to war and calamity. When he spoke of laying aside in a
few days all earthly ambitions and honors for the habili-
ments of the tomb, of caring for nothing save his united
country, even hardened cynics in the audience of anxious
men and women dropped a tear. Once more, as in 1820
and 1833, Clay was to prevail.

But he won this time only through the aid of Webster.
Day after day the Senator from Massachusetts sat in grim
silence while the tumult raged around him, watching quietly
with his sharp eye the winds that tossed contestants to and

716 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

fro. Then on March 7, 1850, casting off all doubts like a
strong man preparing for a race, he rose and delivered the
extraordinary oration that was fated for all time to bear
the date of its utterance. Abolitionists had hoped that he
would demand the express exclusion of slavery from all the
new territories. Instead—to the dismay of the anti-slavery
faction—Webster gave the weight of his great name and
his eloquence to a plea for compromise on that point and,
enlarging his tender to the planters, agreed to a drastic law
for the return of fugitive slaves.

‘He is a man who lives by his memory; a man of the past,
not a man of faith and hope,” was the comment of Emerson
when the news reached his ears. ‘His finely developed
understanding only works truly and with all its force when
it stands for animal good; that is, for property.” Lowell,
Whittier, and Longfellow joined in the condemnation. Less
generous critics charged Webster with having sold out to
the southern Whigs in an effort to gain the presidency. His
friends, practical men of affairs, replied that it was not
ambition but an overmastering love of the Union that led
him to risk all in an effort to preserve it.

At the close of a parliamentary battle that lasted for
the better part of a year, the grand results were finally
written into a series of laws, all of which were signed in
September, 1850, by President Millard Fillmore, who had
taken office on the death of General Taylor. To the great
joy of the Texas bondholders who had labored long and
hard in the interest of their depreciated securities, the
boundaries of ‘Texas were adjusted and a large payment was
made to that state by way of compensation. On condition
that in due course they should be taken into the Union, with
or without slavery as their constitutions at the time might
decree, the territories of Utah and New Mexico were
formally organized—thus rejecting the Wilmot Proviso
without guaranteeing the extension of slavery. Offsetting
in some measure the concessions to the South, California
was admitted as a free state.

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 717

The disposition of the new territories was supplemented
by two measures touching the subject of slavery. The slave
trade—not slavery itself—was abolished in the District of
Columbia, an offering to liberty which was immediately
counterbalanced by a new fugitive slave law extreme both in
letter and in spirit. For the purpose of taking the business
from the hands of state and local authorities likely to be
swayed by a passion for freedom, the act provided for an
array of federal officers to cooperate in the seizure and re-
turn of slaves. It laid heavy penalties on all who placed
obstacles in the way of enforcing the law. It permitted a
master or his agent by a mere affidavit to claim an alleged
fugitive and to take the accused for a summary hearing be-
fore a federal commissioner—a hearing in which the Negro
was denied the right of trial by jury and the privilege of giv-
ing evidence in his own behalf. If a federal marshal al-
lowed a slave to slip through his hands, he was liable to a
civil suit for damages. For a decision in favor of a claim-
ant, a commissioner received a higher fee than for a Judg-
ment releasing a defendant. In this fashion the great states-
men of 1850 planned to put to rest the sectional conflict that
threatened once more to destroy the balance of power in

the Union.
§

The clash of interests and sections over questions of do-
mestic policy was also carried into the sphere of foreign
commercial relations, especially in the Orient. If Demo-
cratic low-tariff measures caused great shocks in the North-
east, they did not uproot the domestic enterprise of indus-
trial captains or destroy their trade in China, India, and
the East Indies. On the contrary, by cutting down the de-
mand for American commodities at home, low tariffs drove
northern manufacturers to search with still greater avidity
for new outlets abroad—especially in the Far East where
prospects were brighter than in the overcrowded markets
of Europe.

718 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Moreover, planting statesmen, as eager to make money
as cotton spinners, took note of the fact that one of the
great southern staples, tobacco, might find—as it ultimately
did—an immense sale among the teeming millions of China.
‘There is reason to suppose,’ wrote a Democratic Secre-
tary of the Navy to the Senate in 1853, ‘‘that our tobacco
will be generally received there as a substitute for this
poisonous drug [opium]. This article now so abundantly
produced by our tobacco-growing states will then become
the pioneer of our trade and open the way for our manufac-
tures of cotton, wool, and particularly of cutlery and other
manufactures of iron. ... The production of tobacco
would be increased in a measure corresponding to the in-
creased demand of the two hundred millions of Chinese
consumers and thus our national wealth would be greatly
augmented.”’ Even the stanchest Democrat had no objec-
tion if Yankee mill owners sold cloth in China. ‘They
merely protested against paying duties on goods they im-
ported and they were only too happy when cargoes of
tobacco could accompany boxes and bales of gray shirtings
across the Pacific.

Nevertheless the major portion of the Far Eastern trade
brought profits to northern ship owners and manufacturers
rather than to growers of cotton and tobacco and it was
natural that the Whig spokesmen of business, not the
agrarian Democrats, should be eager to lend the protection
of the State Department and the Navy to the advancement
of foreign commerce. By no accident, therefore, did that
loyal advocate of industrial prosperity, Daniel Webster,
promote, while serving as Secretary of State under Whig
Presidents, the three most startling achievements on behalf
of American interests in the Pacific Ocean previous to the
defeat of Spain by Dewey at the battle of Manila Bay in
1898—namely, the first commercial treaty with China, the
specific reservation of Hawaii, and the opening of Japan’s
barred door.

Perhaps it was no accident either that the first American

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 719

naval officer to formulate and apply on the high seas im-
perial designs for taking navai bases and opening commer-
cial ports by demonstrations of physical force—Commodore
Perry who was selected to bring Japan into business rela-
tions with the United States—was a sailor from Providence,
Rhode Island, long one of the chief centers of the China
trade. It was certainly due to no mere whirl of fortune’s
wheel that the Secretary of State who pulled down the
American flag in Formosa on the eve of the Civil War was
a Democratic predecessor of the ‘peerless orator’ from
Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, who later declared in
favor of independence for the Philippines.

Appropriately enough, the first effective appeal for polit-
ical and naval guarantees for Oriental trade was laid before
the House of Representatives in 1840 by Abbott Lawrence,
a cotton-mill owner of Massachusetts, bosom friend and
financial backer of Webster. It came from American mer-
chants in Canton asking for armed protection and a com-
mission to secure a treaty of commerce with China. Know-
ing full well the importance of the China trade, so highly
profitable to the metropolis of his state, the Democratic
President then in power, Martin Van Buren of New York,
ordered the East India squadron under Commodore
Kearny, to sail for Chinese waters. Within a few months,
the Whigs rode triumphantly into Washington behind their
leader, General Harrison, but with their drums muffled.

Hands still more willing and expert, therefore, grasped
the wheel. Daniel Webster became Secretary of State and,
taking up the threads of Oriental policy, wrote for the
President a special message on the China business which
was promptly sent to Congress for approval. In this eco-
nomic document, after calling attention to the fact that the
China trade was now worth about nine millions a year,
Webster proposed an appropriation for a special mission
to visit the Son of Heaven in quest of commercial rights.

Interested and attracted by the idea, Congress voted the
money—in spite of outcries on the part of the old Jack-

720 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

sonian Democrat, Senator Benton. Caleb Cushing, de-
scendant of a Newburyport shipmaster—a man who knew
about the substance of the China trade—was selected to
head the delegation, with Webster’s son, Fletcher, as sec-
retary. The mission went, saw, and conquered, easily, as
it happened, because Great Britain had recently beaten the
Chinese in the Opium War and the Mighty One at Peking
was in a chastened mood. With a flourish, Cushing signed,
on July 3, 1844, a convention with the Imperial minister
which secured for Americans commercial privileges in the
open ports of China and the right to be tried in their own
consular courts when charged with violating Chinese law.
‘By that treaty,’’ wrote Cushing exultantly, ‘‘the laws of
the Union follow its citizens and its banner protects them,
even within the domain of the Chinese Empire.” ‘Thus
was inaugurated a formal commercial and political connec-
tion between the government of the United States and the
government of China.

A few years later, after the Whigs had again ridden into
power, this time behind General Taylor, and Webster had
once more become Secretary of State, the practices of a firm
Oriental policy were resumed. On returning to authority,
Webster found that a French naval officer, serving under
the weird adventurer, Louis Napoleon, had just made a
hostile demonstration against the Hawaiian Islands and
was evidently in a mood to seize them. Now the Secretary
could easily recall that when he was serving in the State
Department under Tyler he had received a delegation of
Hawaiians, then visiting America under missionary auspices,
and informed them that the government of the United
States would permit no European power to seize their
country, colonize it, or overturn the native government.
Remembering that pledge in 1851, Webster instructed the
American minister at Paris to warn the French against
undertaking imperial projects in that part of the Pacific.

Some Democrats, it seems, would have been willing to
take possession of the islands then and there if details could

THE POLITICS ORSTHE ECONOMIC 'DRIET F2i

have been agreed upon. At all events, Webster’s Demo-
cratic successor, W. L. Marcy of mercantile New York,
did draw up a treaty of annexation but he could not get it
ratified by the Senate. It proposed large annuities to the
deposed princes and that violated Jeffersonian simplicity.
What was more significant, it provided for the ultimate
admission of Hawaii into the Union as a free state. The
time was not yet ripe.

Far more important than Webster’s reservation of
Hawaii for American usage was his prompt and efficient
action in initiating the mission that opened Japan to Ameri-
can commerce. For over two hundred years the govern-
ment of that island empire had kept its ports closed to
foreign trade—save for one harbor where the Dutch were
allowed to carry on a small amount of business—evincing
an imperious desire to be let alone by aliens. That was the
state of affairs when Americans began to search eagerly
for markets all over the Pacific, resolute Americans who
were not slow to protest against exclusiveness of any kind.
From time to time United States naval officers cruising in
the neighborhood were directed to sound the government of
Japan on the subject of commercial relations as well as on
the matter of protection for shipwrecked American sailors.
But all such appeals failed to move the Shogun who ruled
in the name of the Emperor over the Land of the Rising
Sun.

Not dismayed by repeated rebuffs, merchants of the At-
lantic cities, especially of New York, continued to press for
action against the restrictive policy that prevailed in Yedo;
and Webster now gave more heed to their demands. By
way of a preliminary stroke, he issued a commission to an
American naval officer in Chinese waters, instructing him
to sail for Japan and do what he could to open the door.
Among other things, Webster asked for the right to buy
coal of the Japanese, informing them that this precious sub-
stance was ‘‘a gift of Providence deposited by the Creator
of all things in the depths of the Japanese islands for the

722 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

benefit of the whole human family’”—a lofty sentiment that
had peculiar reverberations in subsequent years. The ap-
peal was eloquent but the first commissioner was not able
to carry out his orders.

Undiscouraged, Webster then sent to Japan a second
agent, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, with an imposing, if
small, naval force. Having resolved in his own mind to
seize neighboring islands by main strength, if necessary to
execute his decrees, Perry was in the proper mood to
frighten Yedo into concessions. ‘To show his mettle, he
ignored the traditional rights of the Japanese, violated their
territorial waters, disregarded their laws, and spurned their
protests.

But these actions might have been without avail had cir-
cumstances not helped the Commodore. Whatever their
desires, the Japanese knew that the British had just broken
down the barriers of China by arms and that both British
and Russian battleships were at hand waiting to work their
will on Japan. Moreover, the American sea captain at the
front door, besides displaying tenacity, generously offered
the Japanese facilities for trade, told them that the Chinese
were coming to America, worshiping their own gods freely
and growing rich, and gave them a cordial invitation to
come and do likewise. So on March 31, 1854, after Web-
ster had gone to his long home, the treaty that ‘gently co-
erced” Japan into friendship, to use the language of Seward,
was duly signed and four years later, Townsend Harris
crowned the work with a commercial treaty.

By this time, under the leadership of forth-putting men
like Perry, professionals in the Navy Department had con-
ceived a philosophy of action in the Pacific that was to
accomplish results in the years tocome. Though the Demo-
crats were careful to oust civilians from office whenever
they got possession of the federal government, though they
were willing to send as consuls to the East planters who
knew nothing of trade or the Orient, they never had the
temerity to place vessels of the Navy in command of men

THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMIC DRIFT 723

who had never seen the sea. Favored by circumstances,
therefore, a consistent naval tradition was easily framed
and adopted by men in permanent tenure—and cherished
even when triumphant agrarians were in the saddle at
Washington.

That tradition, as set forth with great care by Com-
modore Perry, was startling in its simplicity. ‘‘We cannot
expect,”’ he said, “to be free from the ambitious longings
of increased power, which are the natural concomitants of
national success.”’ ‘This seemed axiomatic. ‘When we
look at the possessions in the East of our great maritime
rival, England, and the constant and rapid increase of their
fortified ports, we should be admonished of the necessity
of prompt measures on our part. ... Fortunately the
Japanese and many other islands of the Pacific are still left
untouched by this unconscionable government; and some of
them lie in a route of great commerce which is destined to
become of great importance to the United States. No time
should be lost adopting active measures to secure a sufficient
number of ports of refuge.”’

Acting on such ethical assumptions, the Commodore
seized the Bonin Islands, raised the American flag here and
there, and set precedents. Then, as fate would have it, the
Whigs were soon turned out of power and a Democratic
Secretary of State, taking the Constitution seriously, told
Perry that the President could not take possession of distant
territory without the consent of Congress. Ere long, the
flag was lowered in the Bonin Islands and Japan reasserted
her sovereignty.

The same Democratic indifference to commercial consid-
erations that wrecked for a time such imperial enterprises
was also responsible for the loss of Formosa. Although
very few citizens of the United States were aware of the
fact, that “beautiful island” was actually brought within
American grasp by the activities of a zealous commissioner
in China, Dr. Peter Parker. Always searching for attrac-
tive opportunities, this enterprising official, a medical mis-

724 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

sionary translated to a government post, found that an
American company, while engaged in exploiting the trade of
Formosa, had raised the Stars and Stripes at Takow; and
having an eye to good real estate Parker made haste to ad-
vise annexation.

With diplomatic instinct Parker immediately wrote to
the State Department expressing the hope that ‘‘the gov-
ernment of the United States may not shrink from the
action which the interests of humanity, civilization, naviga-
tion, and commerce impose upon it in relation to Tai-wan.”
In the meantime an American naval officer on the spot
offered to keep the colors flying until word could be received
from Washington. ‘That was in 1857. When Parker’s
letter arrived, if Senator William H. Seward is to be ad-
mitted as a witness, the government was dominated by
southern planters, cold to the pleas of the commercial
interests. At all events the Democratic Secretary of State
informed the impetuous Parker that the military and naval
forces of the country could only be used “‘by authority of
Congress.” ‘The proposal to annex Formosa was not even
laid before that august body. So the flag came down in
Formosa—to rise forty years later in the Philippines not
very far away.

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CHAPTER XVI

Democracy: Romantic and Realistic

HE grand political ideas stamped with popular ap-
proval by the American Revolution and by the
triumph of Jeffersonian Democracy thrust them-

selves ever deeper into the thoughts and emotions of the
people as the nineteenth century advanced, and shot out
their ever-widening circles of implication as new problems
of life, labor, and government were flung upward for con-
sideration. Had there been no significant changes in the
economic structure of the nation, had there been no novel
social forces let loose in the national arena, had there been
no additional impacts from revolutionary Europe, the great
concepts of human rights and human equality, professed
if not always followed by the Fathers, would have altered
the intellectual climate for philosophy, letters, and the arts.

But on top of the expanding and reverberating notes of
the Jeffersonian anthem, came the sharp vibrations of the
revolution made by technology and applied science, doing
more to shatter the old patterns of speculation and unfold
vistas of endless progress for democracy than all the up-

125

726 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

heavals and renaissances of the centuries that had gone
before. Though the age of machinery opened in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, though Washington lived
to see whirling spindles driven by water power, the machine
process really did not get into high momentum until the
era of Jackson and Lincoln.

Once the industrial revolution was fairly started, its
effects upon culture—upon intellectual interests, esthetic
appreciation, and the institutions for the distribution of
knowledge—were swift and cumulative. Under its stresses
and strains the whole social structure was recast. To the
old fortunes made from shipping and trade were added
greater and more numerous fortunes wrung from textiles,
steel, hardware, pottery, and railways. There were now
large family estates to be taxed for popular education, to
afford leisure for sons and daughters, and to offer patronage
for letters, science, and the arts. As the shadow follows
the sun, so in the wake of the expanding middle class came
the ever-swelling industrial proletariat with its tendencies
to radical opinion concerning society and government.
Equally inevitable was the rise of a large body of women
workers for factories, mills, and shops, with swift reper-
cussions on the law and practice of domestic relations.

In the process occurred a rapid concentration of popula-
tion—a condition so intimately related to stimulating and
supporting cultural enterprises. During this middle period,
roughly speaking between 1815 and 1860, overgrown vil-
lages suddenly became important cities; New York, which
had a population of about thirty thousand when Washing-
ton was inaugurated, reached half a million before the
election of Lincoln. At the latter date, Cincinnati and
Chicago combined had more inhabitants than all the cities
in the United States when independence was declared. With
advancing capitalism came periodical industrial panics which
shook the social order from top to bottom, intensified the
poverty of the cities, and aroused deep public interest in
all phases of social economy. By no means last in cultural

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 727

significance, the avalanche of goods which flowed from the
machines awakened new wants, created among the masses
new desires, and stirred all society with aggravated acquisi-
tive tastes.

Besides releasing terrific economic energies, the tech-
nology and science of the machine process thrust all kinds
of material devices into inherited customs and modes.
Expanding railway lines within the United States and the
growing commerce of steam vessels in seven seas set in
motion social currents ruinous to local rigidity in thought
or practice. ‘The telegraph and power-printing machinery
transformed the newspaper business, gave to the country
a penny press, made possible the instantaneous dissemina-
tion of news from Boston to San Francisco, and permitted
the masses to break in upon the intellectual monopoly of
the upper classes with relative ease. New magazines and
publishing houses, called into being by social changes and
technical apparatus, enlarged the market for literary wares
and by enabling authors to live by the pen diverted more
talent to the field of letters. The scientific spirit that accom-
panied the technical overturn spread into every depart-
ment of life and opinion, applying its inexorable analysis to
the mysteries as well as the materials of society.

In addition to these capital results of the industrial revo-
lution, which were common to that economic upheaval in
all other countries, there were a number of accessory
features peculiar to America, in the middle period. For
one thing, an increasing proportion of the men and women
who worked in the new factories were drawn from alien
nationalities; the flood of immigration broke all previous
records, complicating the mixture of races and tongues.
Parallel in time with this invasion were the gold rush to
California and the steady opening of cheap lands in the
West which, while disintegrating the older rural communi-
ties of the East, carried the center of population rapidly
toward the setting sun. Men who were poor one day were
millionaires the next; women who did the family washing

728 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

on Monday moved into palaces on Wednesday and rode to
church on Sunday in carriages. With the inrush of immi-
grants the Catholic Church, that ancient bugbear of Pur-
itans and Presbyterians, multiplied the number of its com-
municants, forcing merchants and politicians to adopt cir-
cumspection in advertising their wares, and arousing once
more the historic antipathy of Protestants.

Given all these turbulent factors, coupled with a surging
Jacksonian Democracy of farmers and mechanics uncon-
trolled by a unified monarchy, clerical hierarchy, or aris-
tocracy, the middle period was inevitably an age of mass
movements—an age of lectures, public schools, circuses,
museums, penny newspapers, varied propaganda, political
caucuses, woman suffrage conventions, temperance reform,
proletarian unrest, labor organization, Mormonism, Miller-
ism, mesmerism, phrenology—an age of shoemakers, car-
penters, and sons of poor parsons writing poems and essays,
of women erecting colleges, asserting rights and taking part
in every phase of the American opera, grand or comic—the
martial notes of the agitator mingling with the vibrant tones
of the moralist, preacher, and educator—pioneers in opinion
marching forward, sometimes inspired, often ignorant and
usually crotchety, to the conquest of the future in America.
“Madmen, and women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggle-
tonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day
Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Unitarians, and Philos-
ophers’’—in these lines Emerson summarily described the
seething democracy of his time.

The very exuberance of the age—an exuberance which
amused and irritated foreign visitors, such as Dickens, and
induced a modern writer, Meade Minnigerode, to fling at
the decade the disparaging title, The Fabulous Forties—
was no mere expression of democratic perversity. Rather
did it flow from the dynamic efforts of the struggling multi-
tudes, granted some leisure and an economic surplus, to
entertain and decorate themselves after the fashion of
classes supposed to be their “‘betters.”” Finding a limitless

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 729

reproductive power in the machine, captains of industry
borrowed, duplicated, and sold to the masses the things
already available, the plumage of ‘superior’ persons:
oil paintings, pottery, spindle leg chairs, gilt frames, mir-
rors, and rugs copied after the designs of Versailles and
London. Even the blazing chandelier of flashing crystal
so conspicuous in the homes of the democracy was imported
from drawing rooms soon to be celebrated for all time as
Mid-Victorian. No doubt there was something bizarre
about the wide distribution of goods, real or imitative,
once restricted to limited classes, but whether hitter or
sweet it was the natural fruit of the machine.

§

Among the many varieties of opinion that streamed from
Europe into the deeply agitated America of the middle
period were three which helped to deflect thought into novel
channels. The first was a new philosophy or pattern of
ideas evolved by doctrinaires to combat the scientific
theories of the eighteenth century—that chain of theories,
hard, mathematical, and mechanical, which stretched from
Descartes to Laplace. To all such speculations concerning
the nature of things, the political relations of the European
powers, during the disturbances which preceded and accom-
panied the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars,
gave a decided bent. For nearly a quarter of a century,
England and France were locked in a deadly war over com-
merce and empire, and French ideas were, therefore, made
tabu in the polite circles of English society—notwithstand-
ing the artistic forms given them by the poems of Words-
worth, Shelley, and Byron.

In this controversy, the ruling classes of Prussia and
many minor German states were arrayed on the side of
England; by reason of the war and their aristocratic preten-
sions, they too came to hate France and French radical
views. Furthermore, during the armed contest with their

730 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

redoubtable foe in Paris, the Germans, long divided among
hundreds of principalities, were drawn together in an ag-
gressive nationalism. Once Frederick the Great, despising
the literature and language of his native land, had made
Voltaire a bosom companion;:after the outbreak of the
French war and especially after the ruinous defeat at the
hands of Napoleon, all Germany was thrown into an uproar
over projects for creating a purely German culture—
philosophy, science, and the arts. In this period of ‘Sturm
und Drang”’ came a great flowering of the German intellect;
Kant, Goethe, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel wrought mighty
tomes with their pens, sending reverberations around the
world.

The outstanding figure in this Teutonic renaissance, a
man destined to have directly or indirectly a powerful influ-
ence on American thinking, was the Prussian philosopher,
of remote Scotch origins, Immanuel Kant. The son of a
pious mother, Kant imbibed in his early youth the doc-
trines of a mildly evangelical Puritanism. ‘Thrown by his
early teachings athwart the mechanical creed promoted by
scientific thinkers from Descartes and Locke to Hume and
Voltaire, he turned with sympathy to the romantic enthusi-
asms of Rousseau, that arch-agitator and agricultural
prophet, who regarded science as an enemy, not a friend
of mankind.

Fortified by strong emotions, Kant worked out the
Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, a
gigantic pile of thought, heavily laden with ponderous
words, which kindled anew the philosophy of sentiments,
and furnished somber authority for counteracting the de-
structive effects of analytical reasoning upon established
concepts and institutions. The upshot of Kant’s system for
the man in the street was the declaration that the great
ideas of God, soul, freedom, right, duty, and immortality
cannot be tested at all by our contacts with the world of
material things but ‘‘transcend” the experiences of our
senses; they are intuitively inexorable and are discovered

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 731

to be absolutely true by introspection, or the internal exam-
ination of our mental structure. Of course, apostles could
light almost any kind of candle at Kant’s altar, but in an
age of revolt against France and French reason, it was the
conservatives rather than the radicals, sentimentalists
rather than scientists, who drew energies from the great
philosopher of Koenigsberg.

And it was to Germany, at the opening of the nineteenth
century, that American students, set free by new accumula-
tions of industrial wealth, turned for light and guidance.
They could not go very well to the English universities of
Oxford and Cambridge where the monopoly of the Anglican
Church was still unbroken. For sons of Northern Federal-
ists, France was also anathema: French radicalism was
associated with the devil and with defeat at the hands of
Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, in France the reaction
against the revolution, under the leadership of men like
De Maistre, turned to Catholic doctrines for comfort—
doctrines equally proscribed by descendants of Puritan
divines.

On the other hand the North German states were Prot-
estant, evangelical, and practically free of French taint.
So it was to Germany that an increasing number of Ameri-
can students, especially from New England, flocked during
the middle period. There they got transcendental philos-
ophy, a thorough training in classical literature, and a fine
hatred for the French “mechanical” school. Those who
did not go to Germany got the same medicine indirectly
from Thomas Carlyle, great feudal romanticist, and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, poet and dreamer, who made the Eng-
lish-speaking world acquainted with German writers and
German philosophy.

The second nucleus of opinions imported from Europe
in these decades was a new version of the concept of prog-
ress which had been so potent in the days of the early
republic. It is one of the curious but neglected facts of
history—illustrating again the irrefragable unity of all

732 THE RISE OF. AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

western thought—that a French army officer, who proudly
wrote himself down as ‘‘a descendant of Charlemagne and
a soldier under Washington,” gave to the nineteenth century
the doctrine of socialism as the goal of progress. That
oficer was Count de Saint-Simon, who fought in the Amer-
ican war of independence—interested, as he said, not in
the war, but in its object—and in the New World got a
glimpse of an order of things in which the humblest should
be freed from the galling chains of poverty and disease.
Accepting at face value the theories of Condorcet and
the dreams of the early American republicans, Saint-Simon
announced in 1815 the coming ‘“‘perfection of the social
order.” To summarize in the language of Bury the process
by which this creed was reached: ‘As the goal of develop-
ment is social happiness, and as the working classes form
the majority, the first step towards the goal will be the
amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This will
be the principal problem of government in reorganizing
society and Saint-Simon’s solution of the problem was
socialism.’’ Of course elements of this idea were not new
and thinkers such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier
reached similar conclusions by other routes, but Saint-Simon
furnished the first dynamic drive for the economic dogma.
The third central pattern of theories derived from Eu-
rope in the age of Jackson and Lincoln was the thesis of
evolution applied not only to society but to all living forms.
Though popularly associated in its beginnings with the pub-
lication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the
idea was, as students of the history of science well know,
long in the stage of formulation. The Greeks and Romans
had vaguely hinted at the changing course of all things; and
their concept of nature and man, submerged for centuries
under Christian theology, finally began to work powerfully
on the thought of western Europe, after the classical re-
vival. Then, with the rise of modern science, the notion
of development could hardly be escaped, as the various
branches—such as botany, geology, zoology, and anatomy,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 733

and later biology and anthropology—flourished in the
eighteenth century and foliated richly in the early decades
of the nineteenth.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Buffon, the great
naturalist, with an eye on clerical censorship, cautiously sug-
gested the mutability of species. Across the Rhine, the
poet, Goethe, boldly declared that all the more perfect
organisms had sprung from a common stock. Meanwhile
Lamarck, the distinguished professor of natural history
at the Paris Botanical Gardens, caught faint sparkles of
the electric word before he passed from the scene, blind
and poverty-stricken, in 1829. In England, Lyell, carrying
on the work of James Hutton, completed in 1833 his epoch-
making treatise on geology, showing the evolutionary story
written in the layers of the earth and striking a trenchant
blow at traditional cosmogony. In short, Darwin and his
co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, crowned labors that
had been transforming all phases of natural science for
many decades.

When at length at the close of the middle period, the
Darwinian hypothesis was launched in finished form, its
ruinous implications for the Miltonic hypothesis were
quickly grasped. Disregarding accepted Biblical chronol-
ogy, it asserted the antiquity of man and the earth. Reject-
ing the belief that each species of living beings was the
result of an original divine act, it proclaimed the mutability
of species. It alleged that there were no sharp lines between
them; that they were gradually shaded into one another
when classified according to characteristics; that they were
all branches of a common tree of life; and that they had
slowly evolved from simple to complex forms.

Moreover, this evolution was to be explained not by
divine interposition but by natural causes—the struggle for
existence, adaptation to environment, and the survival of
the fittest. In every respect therefore the new theory ran
counter to the Christian concept of creation, making grave
difficulties for those who tried to reconcile it with the doc-

734 THE RISE.OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

trines of the fall of man, original sin, Virgin birth, salvation
by faith, and resurrection.

§

In the currents of religious life in America during this
period was revealed in myriad forms the influence of new
factors and forces—especially the machine, science, the ex-
panding frontier, democracy, immigration, and imported
thought-patterns. The power of devouring science and
secularism was made manifest in the continued growth of
Unitarianism among the Congregational churches and in the
steady retreat of ancient tribal visions of the deity before
the devices of rationalism.

At the opening of the epoch, in 1817, died Timothy
Dwight, ‘‘the last of the Puritans” of the Edwardian line-
age; in the hands of the new generation religion assumed a
more “‘liberal’’ garb, namely, one in closer conformity to
the revelations of naturalistic researches. Early in life,
Emerson left the pulpit because he could not endure the
ceremony of communion even in an attenuated symbolic
form. His congregation, generous in its theology, sought
to “induce him to remain, he administering the Lord’s sup-
per in his sense, the people receiving it in theirs’? but the
preacher of Concord would not bring himself to accept that
charitable accommodation. An age was coming to an end.
If Andover Seminary long continued to be the home of
orthodoxy, such men as Horace Bushnell, Mark Hopkins,
and Henry Ward Beecher carried. into pulpits far and
wide messages of Christianity that must have made Jona-
than Edwards writhe in his grave. And the era had hardly
closed when Beecher accepted a mild version of Darwin’s
evolution as the key to the creative process.

Conforming to the restless spirit of Jacksonian Democ-
racy was a remarkable growth in the Methodist and
Baptist churches, especially in the West and Southwest.
Undoubtedly J. Franklin Jameson is right in relating the

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 735

extension of political equality with the prosperity of the re-
ligious bodies that reject the Calvinist doctrine of election
for the favored few. How could Jacksonian Democrats
who exalted the masses of farmers and mechanics believe
in a system of theology which condemned most of them to
hell in advance without a hearing and reserved heaven for
a select aristocracy favored of God? Of course the Presby-
terians also flourished during the middle period, as the
Scotch-Irish population increased, but the followers of John
Calvin did not maintain the relative strength which they
commanded in the colonial age. ‘The unbreakable logic of
Edwards still stood but it no longer had the same appeal
in many sections of the country.

Intimately affliated with effervescing democracy—par-
ticularly on the frontier—were the new sects and ebullient
revival meetings that so distinguished the time. Of course
the rise of visionaries and fiery apostles was not a strange
phenomenon; Simeon Stylites, in sheer religious ecstasy,
spent thirty years of his life on a pillar to demonstrate his
devotion; St. Francis, St. Dominic, Luther, and Wesley, each
in his day, made clarion calls for religious rededication.
But when once the dominion of the hierarchy and clergy
was badly shattered, as in America, and everyone, high and
low, was permitted to express his religious sentiments and
emotions, to declare and to exhort, a bewildering variety
of dreams and professions was as natural as the unquench-
able enthusiasms of a prosperous population.

It was inevitable therefore that the appearance of sects
and schisms should be a matter of annual occurrence. Two-
seed-in-the-spirit Predestinarian Baptists set themselves up
against Free-will Baptists. Presbyterians broke into four
or five divisions. Methodists, while managing to keep
fairly close together on points of salvation, split over the
slavery question into a Northern and a Southern wing.
Still more radical on issues of faith, Alexander Campbell,
calling for ‘‘a return to primitive Christianity,’ marshaled
a host of followers. Prophesying in great enchantment the

736 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

second coming of Christ and the end of the world, William
Miller enrolled converts and in 1843 solemnly awaited the
heralded occasion; though the failure of the prognostication
damped the ardor of Miller’s rank and file, the belief in
the second advent exerted a continuous influence on religious
thinking in America and even penetrated through its de-
voted evangels into the heart of Korea. In this fermenting
era Mormonism also rose and prospered like the green
bay tree.

As if to magnify the turmoil among established Protest-
ant sects, whole communities were shaken by boisterous
religious revivals. Frontier individualism brought. forth
fruits in theology and theories of salvation no less than in
politics and fostered clerical notions as far removed from
the administrative proprieties of Laud, Mazarin, and
Bossuet as were its theories of self-government.

Only in one quarter was there a marked increase in the
number of those who acknowledged obedience to high pre-
rogative in matters ecclesiastical, namely, among the Cath-
olics, most of whom were to be found in the industrial
cities. But the multiplying communicants of that Church
represented no wholesale return of American Protestants
and skeptics to the ancient creed viewed with such horror
in the colonial regime. It was due rather to the swarming
invasion of well-disciplined peasants from Ireland and
Europe, followed by Catholic clergy prepared to do their
best to hold the faith against the swirling, sapping currents
of American individualism. Unquestionably the task of
keeping the ranks unbroken was difficult and a large por-
tion of the former communicants was lost in the transfer of
their political allegiance. Yet, on the whole, the Catholic
body grew steadily in strength with the rise of immigra-
tion, affording elements of culture quite foreign to the heri-
tage handed down by George Washington, Jefferson, Frank-
lin, and Timothy Dwight.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 737

With respect to intellectual interests of a secular cast,
it was fitting that the age of machinery should give pre-
dominance to science, theoretical and applied, at least, in
the Northeast where industrialism made its conquests. It
is one of the significant phases of history that the develop-
ment of political democracy during three revolutionary
centuries was accompanied by the rise and growth of sci-
ence and invention. Students have been baffled in their
efforts to establish causal relations, to explain why the
world had to wait thousands of years for the steam engine
and the formula of atomic weights, why Rousseau was
working on his Social Contract at the very time that Watt
was bringing the steam engine to an operating basis.

Yet the fact remains that political democracy and natural
science rose and flourished together. Whether in their in-
ception there were deep connections, researches have not yet
disclosed but beyond question their influence upon each other
has been reciprocal. Democracy arrested the attention of
idle curiosity and demanded that the man of microscope and
test tube come into the street to invent, relieve, and serve.
Science, on the other hand, helped to determine the course
of democratic development. It was itself democratic in that
it spurned nothing low or commonplace in its researches—
the mold on decayed vegetables, the composition of the dirt
in the field, the nature of curds in sour milk. Nothing was
sacred to its relentless inquiry. Before it there was neither
prerogative nor privilege.

More than that, science pointed the way to progressive
democracy in its warfare against starvation, poverty, dis-
ease, and ignorance, indicating how classes and nations long
engaged in strife among themselves might unite to wring
from nature the secret of security and the good life. It
was science, not paper declarations relating to the idea of
progress, that at last made patent the practical methods by
which democracy could raise the standard of living for the
great masses of the people. Finally science gave to man
revolutionary concepts of the world and of his place in the

738 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

great scheme of nature, feeding the streams of thought

which wore down ancient institutions of church and state.

Although there might have been no causal relation be-
tween science and democracy, it was a striking coincidence
that, in the age of renewed revolution in Europe and the
Jacksonian upheaval in America, epoch-making generaliza-
tions were made by scientists of the Old World and epoch-
making machines for lightening toil and multiplying pro-
duction of goods were invented in the United States. If
Faraday could announce the law of electro-chemical equiva-
lents in 1834, Morse could announce the completion of the
first successful telegraph line in 1844. If Charles Darwin
could span all creation, Cyrus Field could at least span the
Atlantic Ocean.

§

While there were no kings and lords in Jacksonian
democracy to patronize science, it was fostered by one
means or another. To illustrate, Harvard subsidized Louis
Agassiz, Yale financed Benjamin Silliman, and the federal
naval observatory gave Matthew Maury some leisure for
his researches. By way of supplement, the sale of text-
books for the multiplying colleges and secondary schools
brought additional revenues to scholars and experimenters.
Outside the academic world, the employment of scientists
by the state and federal governments in the making of
surveys and the management of museums also stimulated
talent by giving it an opportunity and economic support.
Finally, the revolution wrought in the art of printing by
the power press and the growth of a huge literate popula-
tion eager for more knowledge offered both a competency
and an independence to writers who could popularize their
specialties. Democracy thus had rewards of its own to
offer—sometimes capricious, no doubt, but hardly more
whimsical than that of noble lords, if Doctor Johnson’s
experience is a test, and with subtle influences on creative
thought not yet clearly understood.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 739

The advance of science in the middle period, as always,
was marked by observation, the accumulation of data, gen-
eralization, and application. In this work of the age,
American specialists rendered constructive services and their
number was legion. Among the throng, five or six men
stood out in bold relief: for example, Silliman at Yale col-
lecting minerals, assembling a chemical laboratory, and pro-
moting national interest in the leading branches of natural
science; Audubon wandering with his wife in the wilds for
long years to study and paint plants and birds, building an
international reputation as an ornithologist; Agassiz at
Harvard laying the foundation for teaching and research
in zodlogy; Maury of Virginia exploring the mysteries of
the sea’s physical geography; Joseph Henry, tireless experi-
menter in physics and meteorology and creator of the first
magnetic telegraph. Through the work of competent spe-
cialists, American botanists, with Asa Gray in the fore-
front, had taken over the study and classification of North
American flora by 1850.

To the labors of individuals and colleges was added
that of associations, local, state, and national, and the vari-
ous surveys carried out under government auspices. In
keeping with the trend, the older projects for general scien-
tific academies were supplemented by specialization. Be-
tween 1815 and the Civil War, the geologists, geographers,
ethnologists, and statisticians were separately organized on
a national scale. And then these societies were crowned by
the American Association for the Advancement of Science
called into being at Boston in 1847 to “‘promote intercourse
between American scientists, to give a strong and more
systematic impulse to research, and to procure for the
labors of scientific men increased facilities and wider use-
fulness.” Shortly after its organization the Association
began to issue annual publications.

Accordingly, before the middle of the nineteenth century
natural science had become by various means a potent
force in the intellectual life of America. Its great depart-

740 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ments—geology, botany, zodlogy, ethnology, chemistry,
physics, and the other disciplines—had been staked out here
as in Europe. The collections of material objects and
recorded data had attained impressive proportions; even
the slow-moving federal government falling into line by
establishing in 1846 the Smithsonian Institution and Na-
tional Museum on the basis of a bequest from an English-
man, James Smithson. There were leaders of power, pa-
tience, and industry at work enlarging knowledge in every
sphere. ‘There were scientific societies and scientific jour-
nals available for the interchange of ideas and discoveries.
There were constant voyages of exploration, survey, and
inquiry in every direction unearthing more data and test-
ing older hypotheses.

To consolidate gains and lay lines for the onward march,
textbooks appeared in the several fields: such as Cleave-
land’s work on mineralogy and geology in 1816; Gray’s
survey of botany in the northern United States in 1847;
and Silliman’s elements of chemistry in 1830. ‘Texts were
supplemented by articles on the minutie of science and
by special volumes on local phenomena.

The quality, variety, and amount of American work were
so important that European scientists were compelled to
take it into consideration. Many of them visited this coun-
try to see the huge terrain on which their colleagues were
operating. The English geologist, Lyell, was well ac-
quainted with students in the United States and made a
long journey through the continent observing American
society, studying natural objects, and conversing with the
thinkers. Darwin kept a sharp eye open for new materials
from this side the water. He was familiar with American
publications and in communication with American workers
in his particular field; for instance, his correspondence with
Asa Gray at Harvard, opened in 1855 and maintained for
more than twenty years, was close, frequent, and intimate.
It involved a continuous exchange of ideas and information
and it showed on the part of the great English pioneer a

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 741

wholesome respect for the best expert opinion across the At-
lantic. Only one who has spent weeks poring over the old
textbooks, government reports, biographies, and records of
museums can begin to appreciate the comprehensive, varied,
and fruitful labors of scientists in that age, so often belittled
by its successors.

Yet it must be acknowledged that the epoch which gave
Faraday, Volta, Berzelius, Lyell, Wallace, and Darwin to
the world produced in America no supreme generalizer in
the realm of pure science. Altogether pertinently that
keen French observer, de Tocqueville, profoundest of the
Europeans who have surveyed the American scene, re-
marked of the Jacksonian era: ‘‘These very Americans who
have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics
have introduced into navigation an engine that changes the
aspect of the world. . . . If the democratic principle does
not on the one hand induce men to cultivate science for its
own sake, on the other, it does enormously increase the num-
ber of those who do cultivate it. . . . Permanent inequal-
ity of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arro-
gant and sterile researches of abstract truths, whilst the
social condition and institutions of democracy prepare them

to seek the immediate and useful practical results of the
sciences. The tendency is natural and inevitable.”

In the main this stricture, if it be such, was justified by
the facts; and there was doubtless something deeply pene-
trating in the philosopher’s exposition of the course of
American science. Absence of generalization may be due
to ignorance or to a failure of supreme imaginative quali-
ties—or to a recognition of the baffling complexity of
things. Generalizations themselves are nearly always sub-
ject to later modifications and rejections; few of them es-
cape the impress of continuous research. American so-
ciety in this particular era was more fluid than that of any
country in the Old World. In any case, American men of
science were not ignorant; if they did not find what Emerson
called the ‘electric word,” they certainly helped to prepare

742 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the way for new explanations of man and nature and
they were equipped by training and knowledge to grasp the
import of all advances in European thought and speculation.

A long time before Darwin announced the consumma-
tion of his labors, the intellectual operations that were to
culminate in his interpretation of life were shared by
American scientists. When Benjamin Silliman, after re-
ceiving a call to a scientific post at Yale, sought to pre-
pare himself for his teaching mission, he went over to study
at Edinburgh where Hutton’s cosmic theories, among the
most advanced of his time, were being carefully ex-
pounded. Grasping the value of research, Silliman, on his
return, founded the American Journal of Science and took
an active part in promoting the new American Geological
Society as a means of stimulating patronage and perform-
ance. When Lyell published his startling treatise on the
creative process, as revealed by a study of the earth, Ameri-
can scientists were ready to appreciate it; when a few years
later he came to this country to lecture, he found a wide
and receptive public awaiting him.

The ferment was already at work. Indeed several years
previous to that, the able Philadelphia botanist, Rafinesque,
had advanced in a tentative fashion the thesis that “‘all spe-
cies might have once been varieties and that many varieties
are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and
peculiar characters.’”’ At the same time Samuel Haldeman,
the talented naturalist and philologist of Pennsylvania, was
evolving the same startling hypothesis.

That Darwin himself was in constant touch with the
progress of science in America is revealed in his correspond-
ence with Asa Gray. As we have said, the two naturalists
exchanged papers and memoranda, asked each other ques-
tions, and advanced theories about various subjects to each
other. The year after their first exchange, namely, in 1856,
Darwin gave Gray a glimpse of his secret and two years
later sent him a long outline of the forthcoming treatise
that was to shake the world. Toward the Darwiniar thesis,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 743

when it came to him in sheets as they were printed, Gray
was cautious, critical, and hesitant, pointing out errors which
Darwin generously and apologetically acknowledged. In-
deed, the English scholar placed Gray among the four
contemporaries whose judgment he most valued. Event-
ually convinced that the theory of evolution was sound,
Gray became an ardent champion carrying the fight for
Darwinism all along the line.

And it must be conceded that the American public was as
receptive to the revolutionary doctrine as that of any Euro-
pean country. If the Swiss scholar, Agassiz, rejected it as
‘‘mischievous,’ the head of Trinity College in Cambridge,
England, refused to have a copy of Darwin’s book in the
library. Though many a clergyman in the American hin-
terland tore his hair and rent his garments, Henry Ward
Beecher, the most popular preacher of his time, after much
reflection, declared evolution to be the key to the natural
world.

Darwin himself stated that “the two most striking re-
views’ of the Origin of Species appeared in the United
States: in the North American Review and the New York
Times. ‘That was in April, 1860. The voice of Ameri-
can science was soon to be subdued to the roar of guns.
“Great God! how I should like to see the greatest curse
on earth—slavery—abolished,” wrote Darwin to Gray a
few weeks after Lincoln’s call for arms. When his wish
was consummated, he and Gray continued their correspond-
ence until the long shadows fell upon them both.

§

If, through lack of talent, through timidity, or for want
of a favorable environment, America made no great con-
tributions to the hypotheses of pure science in the middle
period, her advances in the application of physics and chem-
istry to the satisfaction of human needs were important
enough to warrant a long chapter in any balanced history

744 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of western civilization. In the swift accumulations of the
Patent Office in Washington a marvelous story was told.
Perhaps it was no accident that the plot of land reserved
in the original plan of the capital for a “‘national church
square’ was dedicated to the use of inventors in 1836 and
that behind the facade of a Greek temple was opened in
1841 the largest exhibition room in the United States
for the display of the devices which sprang from American
inventive genius.

It was on American soil in this period that the idea of
using chemicals for the prevention of pain in surgical opera-
tions was efficiently developed for the first time. No doubt
the possibility of accomplishing this triumph had been
sensed by the ancients; primitive races had used leaves as
balms, such as the coca from which cocain is derived.
Moreover, Faraday and Davy had advocated the trial of
drugs as anesthetics. But it was five American experiment-
ers, Long, Jackson, Wells, Morton, and Warren, who
carried vague speculation about anesthetics into realization
—and that in the age of P. T. Barnum and General Tom
Thumb, so much better known.

The distribution of honors among these men is hazardous
business; the French Academy after full investigation
awarded the palm to Dr. Charles ‘Thomas Jackson, born
in the old Plymouth colony in 1805; but that decision has
not been confirmed by the verdict of history. In any event,
on the development of anesthetics by American doctors was
built not only a new surgery but also the science of dentistry,
in which national skill has been so preéminently displayed.
Within a few years practitioners in the United States had
done more for the relief of human pain and suffering than
all the soothsayers and shamans of ten thousand preceding
generations. For the resignation of the mystics, they sub-
stituted the insubordination of the “hard”’ scientific mind
dedicated to “the worship of progress.”

It was during this so-called “vulgar” age that electricity,
which had long occupied the attention of scientists on both

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 745 —

sides of the ocean, was turned by American inventors to
the transmission of messages. A score of individuals
worked at this problem but Samuel Morse effected the
happy combination of the scientific temper and practical un-
derstanding which bore the magnetic telegraph out into the
world of affairs and placed it at the service of mankind.
In the same age, Matthew Maury, exploring the mysteries
of hydrography, became the “pathfinder of the seas,” in
luminous studies pointing out to captains the safest routes
for their vessels and explaining the nature of the ocean
bed to scientists dreaming of transatlantic cables. It was
on his faith in the work of Morse and Maury that Cyrus
W. Field of Massachusetts rested his confidence in the pos-
sibility of submarine telegraphy, organized a company,
raised the capital, demonstrated the feasibility of the
project in 1858, and opened the system to commerce and
international relations in 1866.

Although leading in some phases, Americans were bor-
rowing in others with increasing zeal. In fact, during the
middle period all the great mechanical devices of the Old
World were imported and adapted to American conditions
—textile machinery, locomotives, and steam engines. So
free, indeed, was the circulation of ideas, so close were
the relations of explorers, experimenters, and inventors that
it is perilous to attempt to cut the grand republic of science
too definitely into independent national sovereignties.

§

Under the timid and uncertain patronage of the federal
government a start was made toward making science a
servant for tillers of the soil who in most countries and
ages had been left to struggle along by rule of thumb close
to the margin of subsistence. While President of the
United States George Washington, a gentleman-farmer,
had urged Congress to establish a department for the ad-
vancement of agriculture but provincial politicians, think-

746 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ing that it would destroy local virtues, opposed it. Not
until 1839 was a beginning made by an appropriation to
the Patent Office, used in part for the purchase and distri-
bution of new seeds and plants. The following year agents
of the census began to collect the statistics of American
agriculture which some day will be quickened by a writer
of poetic gifts into the history of the land in the United
States.

While politicians were debating the Wilmot Proviso,
bleeding Kansas, and the fugitive slave law, men of science
were urging, in the highways and byways, the conservation
of natural resources and systematic aid from the govern-
ment for the scientific use of our natural endowment. And
this agitation bore fruit in the very midst of the Civil War
in the establishment of the bureau of agriculture—a depart-
ment without the rank—and provision for the creation of
agricultural colleges in every state of a Union then hang-
ing in a fateful balance.

In town, as well as country, applied science had work to
do; there it had to face new problems created by the growth
of huge industrial populations—problems in sanitation,
transportation, public safety, and convenience. It is to
this epoch that the historian traces impressive move-
ments designed to make the city a safe, healthful, and com-
fortable dwelling-place. Of course, great waterworks,
sewers, parks, and public baths were not novel in the nine-
teenth century. The chief cities of the Roman Empire,
from the capital to the towns of the provinces, carried
municipal improvements to an amazing degree of pro-
ficiency, but the mass of the people, slaves and artisans,
derived small benefit from these mighty engineering achieve-
ments, except perhaps from the public fountains where they
got their water supply.

The middle ages which followed the decline of Rome ex-
hibited retrogression in every sphere of municipal science;
for feudal wars forced the construction of walls around
towns and the congestion of population within their con-

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 747

fines. Narrow streets swimming in mud, open sewers, dis-
ease, and pestilence, no less than beautiful churches, mercan-
tile palaces, and guildhalls, were the outstanding character-
istics of the medieval city. It was not until the seven-
teenth century that the larger municipalities, such as Lon-
don and Paris, began to construct waterworks on a com-
prehensive scale; and at the opening of the nineteenth cen-
tury most cities were still essentially medizval in appear-
ance and in practice.

Thus in municipal administration, unlike letters and pure
science, America could not turn to the Old World for
noble models. In fact, apart from pavements and pub-
lic buildings, London and Paris were not far in advance
of New York in Andrew Jackson’s day; the revolution in
steam and steel which made possible modern improvements
came in America only a few years after it began its wonder-
working transformation in England.

In most respects, therefore, American cities moved along
lines almost parallel with those of European municipalities.
It was in 1822 that Philadelphia opened the Fairmount
pumping station which supplied the city with water. It was
in 1842 that New York completed the Croton water system,
one of the great plants of the modern age. Boston installed
public sewerage in 1823; twenty-six years later New York
created a sewer department and began to attack her sani-
tary problem in earnest. ‘The bath tub made its way slowly
into the homes of the best families. Sidewalks, extensively
introduced in Paris in 1782, appeared in Philadelphia within
four years and were afterward rapidly adopted by other
cities. Pavements of cobblestones which had been popu-
lar in colonial days were gradually extended in some cities
and in other places were supplemented by stone and wooden
blocks. In 1849, New York made Broadway smoother by
paving it with large granite squares. While revolutions
and royal donations in Europe were throwing open to the
masses magnificent gardens and parks, American democracy
was faintly struggling to. break the dreary monotony of

748 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

streets with open spaces maintained at public expense. Bos-
ton continued to cherish the Common inherited from older
days; Philadelphia made a striking departure in 1812 by
buying a small private park; in 1858 New York started the
construction of Central Park, a reservation of nearly a
thousand acres.

The middle period also saw the beginnings of many im-
portant municipal agencies. It was in this era that the first
regular public health service was organized, much to the dis-
gust of citizens who, in spite of the plagues and fevers that
periodically devastated their towns, looked upon their
health as a strictly private affair. In 1853, New York,
following an example set by London twenty-five years be-
fore, ordered policemen to don an official uniform—a blue
coat with brass buttons, gray trousers, and a regulation
cap. After a loud wail about “freemen wearing livery,”
the town constables succumbed and appeared in the new
style. Inthe same decade, Boston and Baltimore, weary of
constant fights among private fire companies, established
municipal brigades. Before that decade closed, street cars
were running in New York, competing with the hundreds of
omnibuses that rattled up and down the main thoroughfares;
the long battle over franchises and rates, attended by poli-
tics and corruption, had begun. William Marcy [Tweed was
mewing his mighty youth in the days of Andrew Jackson.
If the modern reader gathers from reports of the time
that American cities were dirty and unkempt places hardly
fit for human habitation—and the impression is largely
correct—he will do well to balance accounts by a study of
European and Oriental cities, ancient, medieval and
modern.

§

In the field of social speculation, the idea of progress, so
potent in the early republican era, foliated richly in the
new setting afforded by natural science and technology, an-
ticipating in every phase the progressive democracy of the

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 749

twentieth century. The concept of the state as a humane
institution for the promotion of public welfare, as distin-
guished from a mere military or police agency, was exam-
ined from all angles and vigorously expounded in the age
of ‘Old Hickory” and ‘Honest Abe.” ‘‘We believe that
the government, like every other intelligent agency,’’ said
Horace Greeley, “is bound to do good to the extent of.
its ability—that it ought actively to promote and increase
the general well-being—that it should encourage and foster
Industry, Science, Invention, Social, and Physical Progress.
. . . Such is our idea of the sphere of Government.”

Emerson, in his fragmentary but deep-thrusting way,
warned his contemporaries that the recent discoveries of
science, in illuminating affairs of state, bade them think of
the social order not as fixed but continually in the course
of change. He was not sure of the social destiny of man-
kind but he was firm in his belief that the doctrine of evolu-
tion, which he vaguely discussed long before Darwin enun-
ciated his thesis, would utterly ‘‘upset” traditional views
of politics, trade, and customs.

It was within the framework of a large social philosophy
that the most acute analyses of the prevailing issues were
effected—banking and currency, free trade and protection,
the land question, and the problems of labor. Writers
on political economy had not yet committed the fatal error
of separating economics from politics as if the production
and distribution of wealth could be divorced from the civil
‘law under which the process operates. The great theme,
as Adam Smith conceived it, was kept intact; elements, out-
lines, and manuals of political economy pouring from the
presses betrayed a deepening interest in the subject.

Moreover, as in other spheres, appeared some signs of
emancipation from foreign dominance, particularly from
England. Speaking for a country that had become the
workshop of the world and for the moment faced no seri-
ous competition in any quarter, English theorists had found
in free trade a policy that exactly fitted the occasion. Eng-

750 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

lish mill owners wanted cheap bread for their operatives;
hence no tariff on food. Since they were not likely to be
undersold in any market, they could incur the risk of com-
petition in manufactured products at home. Seizing upon
that peculiar condition, which, by the way, was never re-
produced, English political economists proclaimed freedom
of trade as a scientific doctrine—proclaimed it with such
assurance and with such a display of logic that many Ameri-
can professors accepted it as if it were a decree of nature,
in spite of the different economic conditions prevailing in
their own country. )

So it happened that the intellectual operations of the
learned, especially in the colleges, did not always coincide
exactly with the interests and opinions of practical men
engaged in manufacturing. But the requirements of Ameri-
can industry were finally met by Henry C. Carey of Phila-
delphia, who published in 1837-40 three volumes on political
economy in which he sharply criticized the leading precon-
ceptions of the freetraders, sketched a nationalist basis
for protection, and laid the logical foundations for a tariff
system. ‘Io the doctrine of the economic man operated
automatically by self-interest—fallacious at bottom and
dangerous in application—Carey opposed the doctrine of
national interest. Henceforward infant industries were to
stand in no need of champions in the schools.

Meanwhile the rising labor movement found spokesmen
who produced an immense literature sparkling with antici-
pations in every sphere. As early as 1826, L. Byllesby
made pertinent inquiries into the origins of unequal wealth
and the nature of its effect on human happiness. Three
years later Thomas Skidmore declared the new rights of
man—this time, to property. In a similar vein, Frances
Wright preached radical labor doctrines from the platform,
especially with respect to the position of women, her ad-
dresses issued as a ‘“‘Course of Popular Lectures” winning a
great vogue among working people. A decade later Albert
Brisbane proclaimed the codperative gospel of Fourier, who,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 751

in spite of his fantastic schemes, ‘“‘helped to familiarize
the world with the idea of indefinite progress.” Through
translations from the French and in a book of his own en-
titled The Social Destiny of Man, Brisbane created a large
school of reformers. Clinging still to their religion while
recognizing new imperatives, the Christian Socialists found
a genial spokesman in Adin Ballou. Anarchists won.a hear-
ing for their creed in trenchant works by Josiah Warren
and Stephen Pearl Andrews. On the left also, The Com-
munist Manifesto, of German origin, was given an English
dress within a short time after its publication; and the
German refugees fleeing to this country from the reaction
that followed 1848 colored for a time the American stream
of radicalism with this continental hue.

On the whole the note of codperative idealism was strong
and clear during the period, particularly in the eastern
states where the population was becoming congested; where
the fruits of machine industry, bitter and sweet, were fall-
ing upon the earth. Not until the national domain was
flung by the Republican party to the hungry proletariat as
a free gift, more significant than bread and circuses, did the
socialistic idea sink into the background of the labor move-
ment and the strictly realistic business of raising wages and
reducing hours monopolize the thought of labor organizers.

This whole evolution was revealed in the case of Horace
Greeley who, in the forties, vowed himself a socialist,
opened the columns of his Tribune to Karl Marx and the
communists, debated Socialism with H. J. Raymond,
founder of the Times, threw himself into the Homestead
movement, became absorbed in the slavery struggle, and
ended in the embrace of respectability. The fact that men
of Greeley’s mental power and political standing were
drawn to the socialistic philosophy is proof that the agita-
tions of the middle period had reached far beyond the
obscure circles of working people and were deemed worthy
of serious consideration by some who sat in lofty places.
Unquestionably the civil cataclysm of 1861 and the free

752 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

land opened to labor by the Homestead Act of the follow-
ing year checked for decades the strong radical drift.

§

By delving into the records of the past, historians now
helped economists to detach, at least in some degree, the
facts of social evolution in America from the glowing pe-
riods of revolutionary orators. George Bancroft, in 1834,
began to issue a ten-volume History of the United States
ranging from the founding of the colonies to the establish-
ment of the Constitution. Though his New England ori-
gin and his Democratic politics gave many curious twists
to the threads of his narrative, though an avowed intimacy
with the purposes of Providence often lifted him far above
the dusty way, his long and arduous researches gave his
work a value which time has not destroyed.

In a less exalted strain, Richard Hildreth, one of Ban-
croft’s contemporaries, a Federalist from New England,
told the American story from the age of discovery to the
Missouri Compromise. Declaring that of ‘centennial ser-
mons and Fourth-of-July orations” there were ‘“‘more than
enough,”’ he vowed that he wanted to portray the founders
of the nation as they actually were, ‘‘unbedaubed with pa-
triotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of excuses
and apologies, without stilts, buskins, tinsel, or bedizen-
ment.’’ His inquiries were not as deep as those of Bancroft
but his style was more restrained and more scientific.

A disillusioned Federalist, rather than an ardent Demo-
crat, and claiming no special familiarity with the plans of
the Almighty, Hildreth gave a colder and calmer view
of the sacred past. When his first instalment appeared in
1849, a doleful sound went up from patriot quarters but
scholars rejoiced in being able at last to discover something
tangible through the mists. The editor of the Edinburgh
Review, for example, even though he would have found it
hard to discover anything but chauvinistic history at home,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 753

expressed his pleasure in seeing “‘the muse of American his-
tory descended from her stump and recounting her narra-
tive in a key adapted to our own ears.”’

Not content, however, as a modern wit remarked, with
this demonstration of “how civilization came into America
by way of New England,” writers in the middle and south-
ern states began to take a look at the past for themselves.
The novelist, Irving, wrote a substantial biography of
George Washington and then, turning aside from ponderous
tradition, composed a humorous history of the New York
Knickerbockers which delighted everybody except some of
the old Dutch families. As if to offset the one-sided view of
the country that came from the northern schools, George
Tucker of Virginia gave a fine old southern gentleman’s
impression of the naticn’s historic past in a solid, if not bril-
liant, work which deserved deeper consideration than it
ever received.

No less important for the development of accurate his-
torical scholarship in America were the collections of orig-
inal materials which industrious persons now began to as-
semble—collections from which searchers could form inde-
pendent judgments. Foremost in this field was a Harvard
professor, Jared Sparks, who labored long and hard at the
work of compiling and editing. Besides making noteworthy
contributions to American biography, he brought out the
life and writings of Washington in twelve volumes and the
works of Franklin in ten—correcting and polishing the
letters of his two heroes instead of printing them exactly
as they stood with all their errors ‘in spelling, grammar,
and diction. Still, in this editorial mutilation, Sparks inad-
vertently rendered a service to scholarship, for the opposi-
tion aroused by his easy liberties with the texts made his suc-
cessors more wary and precise.

In the same business of collecting and editing, Sparks had
an indefatigable contemporary, Peter Force, who projected
a huge library of American archives and got several vol-
umes through the press before the federal government, un-

754 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

der whose auspices he was working, cut off its financial sup-
port. He managed to make important beginnings and to
forward the spirit of scientific research. Thus the period,
near its close at least, exhibited a growing interest in history
and a bent toward that laborious hunting and assembling
which were then making German scholarship the admiration
of all students in this special field. In time so-called ‘‘sci-
entific history’? was to invade the realm so often monopo-
lized by romance and mere convention.

By the side of the luminaries burned many lesser and
local lights. In every section of the country, from Maine
to Georgia and from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi
Valley, amateur historians and collectors were gathering
papers, writing down folklore, and describing contemporary
life. Timothy Dwight, journeying far and wide in New
England and New York, left behind at his death four
great volumes of his observations and impressions. Tim-
othy Flint rendered a similar service for the Mississippi
country. In one fashion or another an amazing pile of
materials on local life and incidents was amassed. Illinois
alone, to use a single example, was discussed under more
than four hundred titles in works issued between 1818 and
1865. Incollege and private libraries and in state archives -
recorded data were preserved by a thousand hands. The
age of oral tradition and gossip was merging into the age
of sifted and tested facts. Herculean labor yet lay ahead
but by 1860 much ground had been cleared and long strides
taken in the work of placing the study of social evolution in
the United States on a scientific basis.

§

The searches of the economists, historians, and scientists
which threw such a flood of light on the nature of social
origins and development inevitably reached the subject of
the family. If the men had preferred to neglect it, cir-
cumstances did not permit them to exercise that preroga-

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 1755

tive; for in the forties feminism came to the front as one
of the disturbing factors that could not be ignored. The
accumulation of moderate fortunes which enabled the belles
of New York to shine under the chandeliers also gave
education and leisure to thousands of women who never
saw the ballroom of a brownstone mansion.

Indeed, the significant feature of femininity in the middle
period was not the inherited passion for salons done in red
and green—that was as old as [rimalchio—but the inva-
sion of women into fields of industry, science, education,
letters, and civic affairs. Now thoroughly familiar with
creeds such as Charles B. Brown timidly advanced in the.
eighteenth century, women, in open revolt against the mas-
culine supremacy crystallized in the common law, energeti-
cally engaged in formulating political programs which con-
templated sex equality. If liberty was the grand catch-
word for all, if opportunities for advancement were to be
opened to all, high and low, then where did women stand?
That question had been asked softly in the eighteenth cen-
tury. In the mid-nineteenth it was asked in tones that
could be heard by every editor, preacher, politician, and
voter. The lone cry had become a chorus.

This was, as we have seen, the fruition of an agitation
which began in the seventeenth century. Inevitably the dis-
cussion of the rights of man in America, France, and Eng-
land raised the question of the rights of woman but, in the
political reaction that followed the French Revolution, the
hopes of women sank in the general disillusionment.
Europe seemed sick, in spite of the continued debate on
democracy; and radicals began to look for bold experiments
to the United States, where the very newness of things gave
promise of an earlier break in the bondage of law and
custom. For this reason several keen and able women
came from the Old World to study, lecture, or agitate in
the democracy of America; from.Poland Ernestine Rose,
from Scotland Frances Wright, from England Harriet
Martinea.

756 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

It was not mere unrest, curiosity, or agitation that com-
manded a hearing for women. ‘They were already making
themselves count in the affairs of the world. The age
which produced in other countries George Sand, Charlotte
Bronté, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
literature, Rosa Bonheur in art, Caroline Herschell in sci-
ence, Elizabeth Fry in humanitarian reform, and Florence
Nightingale in nursing service on the battlefield also re-
ceived offerings from America: Harriet Beecher Stowe
and Margaret Fuller in letters, Harriet Hosmer in art,
‘Maria Mitchell in science, Dorothea Dix in the care of de-
fectives and delinquents, and Clara Barton in the hospital.
Complacent political and military historians, following the
traditions of their craft, had left women out of their chron-
icles of the American Revolution; Mrs. Ellet in a domestic
history of that cataclysm partly restored the balance of
justice.

With equal determination, Margaret Fuller reminded
gentlemen of the pen that the women of the nineteenth
century had a will and an understanding of their own.
Pained by the slovenly style and the inaccuracies of the
school books, Mary Lyon set to work to make a better
series in history and geography. ‘The recipient of the first
medical diploma granted to women in America in 1849
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell opened in New York an infirmary
for women and children, soon adding to it a medical college
for women. As if reéchoing the call of Anne Hutchinson,
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, of the famous Morse family,
a graduate of Oberlin in letters and theology, entered the
pulpit as a fully ordained Congregational minister in 1853.
While William Lloyd Garrison with little to lose was lead-
ing his crusade for emancipation, the Grimké sisters of
South Carolina freed their slaves, braved the wrath of their
class, and likewise gave their lives to liberty.

Besides making a real headway amid the turbulence of
Jacksonian democracy, a large group of thoughtful women
were deeply stirred by all the germinal ideas in theology,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 757

science, and social economy thrown up in that age. In an
account of a brief conversation with Lucretia Mott in 1840,
for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton reveals what was
going on behind the scenes. ‘She told me of the doctrines
and divisions among the ‘Friends’; of the inward light; of
Mary Wollstonecraft, her social theories, and her demands
of equality for women. I had been reading Combe’s ‘Con-
stitution of Man’ and ‘Moral Philosophy,’ Channing’s
works, and Mary Wollstonecraft, though all tabooed: by
orthodox teachers; but I had never heard a woman talk
what, as a Scotch Presbyterian, I had scarcely dared to
think.”

Mrs. Mott herself was skeptical enough to have pleased
Voltaire. ‘It is often a question,” she wrote, ‘‘and still is
unsettled with me, whether the various religious organiza-
tions, with all their errors, are more productive of good than
evil. But until we can offer something better in their stead
to a people largely governed by religious sentiment and a
natural love for association, it requires great care how we
shake their faith in existing institutions.” In the age of
zoology, Catherine Beecher dared to announce that ‘the
time is coming when women will be taught to understand
the construction of the human frame.”

At every corner critical thought and economic change
were eating away the foundations of the traditional family
system inherited through the republican period from the
colonial age. The abolition of primogeniture and the ex-
tension of civil marriage were bearing fruit; the factory
system and the rise of public schools were offering women
wider opportunities; easier divorce laws were giving them a
new sense of independence. Furthermore, the opening of
the West and the call of the growing cities made girls more
defiant of parental authority and more determined to ex-
ercise their own pleasure both in the choice of work and of
husbands. So marked were these features of American
civilization that Harriet Martineau was amazed by the
contrast with the subjection of women in England.

758 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

In the forties the scattering forces of feminism began
to gather for a mass movement. ‘True, a decade before,
de Tocqueville, chiefly concerned with keeping French
women in their ancient status, declared that he never ob-
served in America an attempt on the part of women to sub-
vert masculine power. ‘It appeared to me, on the con-
trary,’ he solemnly avowed, ‘“‘that they attach a sort of
pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make
it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke—not to shake
it off.’ If the philosopher had come to the country in
1848, he might have noticed something else. In that year
was held a Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in
the state of New York and this was followed by other con-
ventions, East and West, from Worcester, Massachusetts,
to Dublin, Indiana.

In the strain of the eighteenth century document drawn
by men, the Seneca Falls assembly issued a Women’s Dec-
laration of Independence setting forth again the grand prin-
ciples of liberty and equality. Faithful to precedent too,
it presented a list of grievances, after the manner of the
bill of indictment launched against George III: the men
had monopolized the lucrative professions and employ-
ments, they had closed the colleges of higher learning to
woman, they had taxed her to support a government in
which she had no voice, they had deprived her of property
earned by her own labor, they had called her civilly dead
at marriage, they had assigned her a lowly place in the
church, and all in all they had put her in the status of
serfdom. The implications were evident: political, eco-
nomic, and intellectual equality. The note was defiant.
Grave gentlemen, such as Richard Henry Dana, were
shocked and indignant. Sapient editors laughed loud and
long, flinging at the ladies their scornful headlines: ‘“The
Reign of Petticoats’ and ‘‘Insurrection among Women.”

In a little while the pioneer women in the movement,
Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton, Lucy Stone—granddaughter of a captain in Shays’

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 759

army of rebellion and Oberlin graduate—and Susan B.
Anthony, were joined in their advocacy of woman’s rights
by a few men of distinction: Wendell Phillips, Garrison,
Channing, Whittier, and Emerson. Far away on the west-
ern frontier Abraham Lincoln must have heard echoes of
the strife in the early days of his career, for he declared
that he favored sharing government with women. With-
out doubt the agitation for equal suffrage was gaining rap-
idly and would have gone far in the sixties if the anti-
slavery movement and the Civil War had not induced
women temporarily to put aside their cause for one that
seemed even more impelling.

And yet in spite of that great diversion of feminine
energy and enthusiasm, some victories were won by the
forerunners before the second half of the century opened.
In the domain of civil liberty, champions of the new cause
demanded for married women, among other things, the
right to hold and acquire property and to enjoy exemption
from liability for their husbands’ debts. In the masculine
camp this claim raised a storm. The real reason was
obvious but the good reason advanced was to the effect that
the women, in managing property, would be thrust into the
hard scenes of the busy world and suffer a diminution of
their charms. |

Nevertheless, a few outposts were carried with surpris-
ing ease. In 1839 Mississippi emancipated women from
tutelage in the matter of property; in 1848 New York,
Indiana, and Pennsylvania took a similar step; two years
later California and Wisconsin swung into line. Once
started, the march could not be stopped.

The growing respect for the rights of the individual, and
the passion for leveling privileges which inspired the fem-
inist movement also led to inquiries concerning the status
of children. Under inherited usages they were in some
respects the property of the father while he lived; and of
the mother if she survived him. In part this subordina-
tion of children arose from the helplessness of infants and

760 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

in part from the command of the parents over the earn-
ings of their offspring. ‘That parents were as eager as
manufacturers to exploit youth appears written large in the
documents of early investigators. Hamilton had boasted
that the factory system would lead to the employment of
children of ‘“‘tender years” and fathers and mothers, either
through necessity or selfishness, had responded to the call
of the early mill owners, the sacredness of the home afford-
ing the plea of immunity from state interference.

This form of dominion, however, could not escape the
surging forces of Jacksonian Democracy. From all sides
parental sovereignty was assailed—by the trade unions
which felt the competition of children and desired a restric-
tion of apprentices, by the champions of popular educa-
tion, by those who were caught-in the tide of the new
humanism, and by politicians who saw in illiterate citizens
now enfranchised a menace to the institution of private
property. It was no mere co-incidence, therefore, that the
legislative inquiry into child labor undertaken in Massachu-
setts in 1825, perhaps the first in America, coupled a study
of school attendance with an investigation into industry.

Within a little more than a decade there began to pour
from state legislatures laws restricting the hours of labor
for children, requiring a minimum allowance of time for
elementary education, and otherwise restraining the power
of parents to dispose freely of the services of their off-
spring. Before the mid-century was passed, the rights of
children, conceived in the interests of humanity and of the
community, were looming large in statute books and judicial
decisions.

Yet the difficulties of enforcing the new laws were im-
mense, for parents did not lightly surrender the ancient
prerogative nor did the children, emancipated from the
mill, turn joyfully to the schoolroom, in every case. More-
over, as the public mind was not prepared for drastic action,
the legislatures usually left loopholes through which cam-
els could pass. For example, New Hampshire in its law of

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 761

1847 provided that no child under fifteen should work more
than ten hours a day—except with the written consent of
parent or guardian. Halting steps were these but they
were the beginnings of a transformation in the status of chil-
dren. ‘The levelling system of the present age,” lamented
a Presbyterian magazine in the forties, ‘is nowhere more
unfavorable than in the family. . . . The parents’ author-
ity ought to be early, absolute, and entire.” It was a cry
from the past.
§

The revolution in technology, the reconstruction of the
social order under the impact of machine industry, the
advance of science into the domain of cosmogony, the eco-
nomic independence brought to the nation by increased
wealth, the ferment of political equality, the changing status
of women, the clash of parties over domestic issues, and
the new contacts with foreign countries reset the intellectual
stage for speculation about life and for all forms of imagi-
native literature. And the product bore the impress of its
environment. After all, nearly everything that is written
or painted bears some relation to the natural world, to
the things that are done in it, and to opinions about its
constitution.

Except for the monk marooned in a mountain fastness
with nothing save the books of ancient lore, all artists of
brush or word or chisel are caught more or less in the drift
of society. That is inescapable even though some who
enjoy private fortunes or special patronage may try to hold
themselves aloof from contemporary currents and subdue
their creative energies to the ancient patterns.

There is, of course, always a lag to literary and artistic
culture for so much of it is traditional and cumulative.
While the business man tears down his beloved factory
when he finds that his profits can be enlarged by erecting
a new one, no such transparent motive operates in the
realm of the literary and plastic arts. Workers in those

762 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

fields find at hand a great pile of conventional materials,
often so beautiful that it seems a sacrilege to try to copy
them—models by old masters. In any case it is usually
more satisfying to bow to them than to break with them
and apply naive simplicity to current use and contemporary
environment, infinitely easier than to attempt to pry open
the barred gates of the future. All education inclines the
mind to tradition; respectability generally urges one to ac-
cept it; genuine devotion to the creative achievement of the
past often subdues the mind to worship; even a merely tech-
nical knowledge of dead languages and old art sets the
possessor off from the common herd, giving him some of
the distinction which all mankind covets so much.

Nevertheless, as William James cautions us, the worlds
of fact and spirit evolve together; the changing circum-
stances that mark the economic and social development of
nations into epochs also give periods to the evolution of
arts and letters. Divisions are never sharp but they are
undeniable. The America of cotton mills, blast furnaces,
and a continental empire was not the America of stage-
coaches, handlooms, and seaboard villages.

And the northeastern section now possessed just those
conditions of life and economy that were favorable to the
flowering of literary and artistic enterprises, being drawn
into the center of the great vortex of industry, science, and
secularism that was devouring the culture of feudalism and
the soil and sweeping the social order inexorably forward
into the future. First of all, in that section, the substance
of urbanity had been provided by a marked growth in the
density of population. The society of New England, be-
sides being especially compact, had several centers of intel-
lectual friction: Boston with its environs, Hartford, New
Haven, Providence, and Newport; the inhabitants, rela-
tively homogeneous, ingrowing, given to debate, and trained
in self-expression, furnished a larger proportion of people
who were city bred, had received a college education, and
felt competent to instruct the multitude.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 763

Not only was the rate of social exchange highest in the
Northeast, but natural science was there made the servant
of machine industry. If Virginia gentlemen or Philadel-
phia philosophers, like elegant amateurs, had dallied with
physics and chemistry as “curious and interesting branches
of polite knowledge,” smudged and aproned men of affairs
in industrial regions now turned those entertaining sub-
jects to the uses of manufacturing, exalting them in the eyes
of business practitioners willing to help with largesse and
endowments the advancement of inquiries that brought
returns to the counting house. In short, all the ruthless
forces of the acquisitive instinct were, in the Northeast, put
behind the scientific spirit—that protean and dynamic genius
of the modern age, so devastating to the cultural legacy of
agriculture. “Those who believed with the theologians that
it could be exorcised by appeals to the thought-patterns of
Cotton Mather or with Georgia planters that it was all a
perversion of good taste by willful men simply failed to
reckon with fate and doom.

Besides cities, industries, and science, the Northeast had
in virtue of its economic operations a strong passion for in-
dependence. A rising rival of England in the markets of
the world, it felt its strength in riches and, while it desired
protective tariffs against British competitors, it also cher-
ished the sentiments of nationalism in letters and art. If
American cottons and broadcloths were good enough for
citizens to wear, why not American books and pictures at-
tractive enough for them to buy?

Intimately related to these concrete economic factors
were other conditions conducive to cerebration. ‘The rise
of cities, the appearance of the working class, the agitations
growing out of strikes, industrial panics, and spreading
urban poverty simply thrust into the faces of the most
careless bystanders facts and sounds of a new order. With
a rudeness that could not be ignored, a vast and complex
array of phenomena and ideas broke in upon the calm of
agricultural days, directing the sons and daughters of Fed-

764 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

eralists to the consideration of matters their ancestors had
never dreamed of. At the same time, science driven for-
ward by irresistible forces was disrupting the old and sim-
ple plan of salvation that had seemed convincing enough
along the shores of Galilee, in the village churches of feudal
Europe, and in the rural communities founded by yeomen
and gentlemen in colonial America. With doubts about
Biblical cosmogony came doubts about the whole epic, fill-
ing the air with criticism and speculation.

Stirred by the fierce debates, some thinkers turned one
way and some another. Henry Thoreau sought solace in
the offerings of sweet nature. George Ripley passed
through unitarianism to free thought while his wife went
back to the Pope, Saints, and the Church. New versions,
guesses, and criticisms showered like sparks from the hot
iron of the smith, kindling flames of excitement, he and
small, in every direction.

With the ferment rose the demand for literary wares,
with the demand the publishing houses, and with the pub-
lishing houses new wares feeding new anxieties and inter-
ests. In the middle period printing became an important
business. ‘The steam engine that drove a cotton mill could
also drive a press. Capital that might be invested in a
forge or weaving shed might be diverted to a newspaper,
magazine, or book-publishing house. Every year saw the
establishment of new publishing concerns, some destined
to great careers; or of new magazines, fortunate enough
to become household staples.

In this manner the market for literary goods was stimu-
lated, and the cubic contents of printed stuff turned from
the American presses rose from decade to decade. In 1820
not quite one-third of the publications issued in the United
States came from American writers; before the middle pe-
riod had reached its close more than four-fifths were of
domestic origin. ‘Thus the profession of letters was put
on a firm economic basis; at all events the writers of good
prose—women as well as men, for business enterprise kept

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 765

its eyes on ledgers rather than ancient parchments—now
had rewards that lifted them well above the seekers of
patrons in Johnson’s day and the hunters for dinners ir
Grub Street.

If, as Bryant remarked, poets still found it hard to com-
bine the making of verse with fullness of stomach, writers
of novels, stories, essays, reviews, and histories could count
on respectable incomes. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin ran into the millions of copies; Cooper and
Hawthorne made more money with their pens than most
preachers, bookkeepers, and pedagogues; Prescott drew
perhaps a hundred thousand dollars from the royalties on
his works.

Surrounded by a society becoming steadily more urban
in composition, stimulated by new ideas, and furnished a
market, young people of literary aptitudes in the Northeast
could with relative ease embark upon that career. And
circumstances favored the germination of just those apti-
tudes. The line of clerical, professional, and mercantile
families had lengthened by two generations since the Dec-
laration of Independence and more families with leisure had
been created by the steady amassing of fortunes from
manufacturing, merchandizing, and shipping. In this fash-
ion an increasing number of boys and girls who in colonial
times would have been submerged in the mere economy of
living were now afforded opportunities for education and
travel and experimentation.

Thus the personnel for the trade of letters—for letters
is a trade—was enlarged. Thousands could be prepared
for it, could face its economic risks, and could find a sale
for their output. Only a few writers, of course, broke
through the everlasting commonplace into fame; but with-
out the market, without the intellectual friction of urban-
ism, and without criticism, how far could the genius of the
middle period have advanced beyond the provincialism of
colonial times?

§

766 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Nothing more closely fitted the exactions of the age
than the high note of nationalism that reverberated through
the literature of the period. Clearly sounded in the days
of the young republic, it had been amplified by the second
war with England, reinforced by growing economic power
under the shelter of tariff discriminations, and deepened
by the pretensions of Jacksonian Democracy, especially as
the countries of the Old World were subjected again and
again to the storms of political revolution. All the Ameri-
can writers of the age were conscious of its reality and its
appeal—even those who sought to employ the cultural im-
plements of Europe in their intellectual operations.

Echoing the sentiments of Royall Tyler, James Dunlap,
and Noah Webster, uttered when the struggle for inde-
pendence was still keenly mirrored in their minds, Emerson
issued a new manifesto in a Phi Beta Kappa Address de-
livered at Cambridge in 1837. ‘Our day of dependence,
our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws
to a close,” declaimed the orator. ‘The millions that
around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the
sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise,
that must be sung, that will sing themselves. . . . There
are creative manners, there are creative actions and creative
words . .. that is, indicative of no custom or authority,
but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of
good and fair.”

In his view of things, it was subserviency and imitation
that made Americans contemptuous of their own powers
and hence sterile in the creative arts. With many perpen-
dicular strokes, Emerson brought his hammer down on the
American sycophant of his day: “It is for want of self-
culture,” he said in an essay on Self-Reliance, “that the
superstition of Traveling, whose idols are Italy, England,
Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the
imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like
an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 1767

our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at
home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion
call him from his house, or into foreign fields, he is at home
still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his
countenance that he goes the missionary of wisdom and vir-
tue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an
interloper or a valet.

‘“T have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of
the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence,
so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go
abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he
knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat
which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and
grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in
Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapi-
dated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

“But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action... .
We imitate. . . . Our houses are built with foreign taste;
our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
Opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean on and follow the
Past and the Distant. ‘The soul created the arts wherever
they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the
artist sought his model. It was an application of his own
thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be
observed. . . . Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought,
and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the
American artist will study with love and hope the precise
thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil,
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and
form of the government, he will create a house in which
all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment
will be satisfied also. Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Your own gift you can present every moment with the
cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the
adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous
half possession.”

768 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

In the realm of imaginative letters, the independence
which Emerson thus declared could, of course, take many
forms, the simplest being to proclaim the new liberty by
choosing American themes. ‘That indeed was the pro-
cedure adopted by the most distinguished writers of fiction
in the middle period, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gil-
more Simms, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Beverley Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe.

If one of them be taken to illustrate the thesis, it may
well be Cooper, whose first novel, published in 1820, was
the direct outcome of a boast that he could write a better
story than an English tale which he happened to be reading.
Ashamed of this book turned out mechanically in the spirit
of boyish bravado, Cooper then undertook to compose,
as he said, ‘“‘a work which should be purely American, and
of which love of country should be the theme.”

Happy circumstances prepared Cooper to be a path-
breaker. Brought up in his youth in the country, on the
edge of the open wild, unlearned in the formal literary
arts, tutored by a schoolmaster with a dislike for the
Puritans, and early thrown against the raw materials of life
as a sailor, Cooper was not inclined by nature or training
to compete with a Scott or a Balzac in European patterns
of thought, or to dabble in the theological ideas of New
England. Driven to creative work by his own spirit, he
was forced to choose his subjects from the life of his
own people on land and sea rather than the shadow-
haunted realms of Puritan repressions or the medieval
legends of feudal romance. If he was conventional in
his treatment of women, he did but honor the letter and
spirit of the common law, a jurisprudence accompanying
manners that were beginning to dissolve, unknown to him,
before his very eyes.

Without depreciating his experiments in European sub-
ject matter, it must be said that his most successful work
was American tothe core. In that medium he was at home

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 769

and there he avowed a thesis: the story of liberty, clash of
Patriot and Tory, ardent youth against surfeited age, the
adventurous spirit in the primitive forest setting. With a
broad and often stiff. brush, Cooper painted the varied
scene: Indians, pioneers, spies, pirates, slave traders,
soldiers, sailors, planters, farmers, hunters, trappers,
merchants, women, mountain and plain, lake and ocean.
Admitting that he gave the Indian colors far too rosy, all
must concede that he portrayed with a firm hand the Ameri-
can types of his age, revealing their ideas and passions, in
lines bombastic at times but true to life.

And it was just this treatment of the scene he knew that
gave Cooper his standing with contemporary critics abroad
as well as at home, caused Thackeray to look upon him as
the peer of Scott, induced Hugo to rank his work above that
of Scott, and long afterward led Conrad to bow to him as
to a master. Cooper was the first to thrust the Indian
vividly into the foreground of fiction and that act alone was
sufficient, given reasonable competence, to make him sig-
nificant to the dreamers of the Old World still steeped in
the romanticism of Rousseau’s natural man.

Herein lay the secret of Balzac’s exclamation that Scott
was the historian of humanity, Cooper of nature. Indeed,
so deep was this impression with Balzac that, one of his
critical biographers remarks, “‘his usurers, his lawyers, his
bankers, and his notaries owe too much to the sojourn of
his imagination in the cabin of Leatherstocking or in the
wigwam of Chingachgook and there are in the Comédie
Humaine too many Mohicans in spencers and Hurons in
frock coats.’’ At all events, Cooper proclaimed the repub-
lic to the Old World for the first time in a form that made
a wide popular appeal, making Europeans, young and old,
who never heard of Emerson’s essays or de Tocqueville’s
travel book aware of a dynamic country beyond the Atlantic
Ocean. Moreover, in letters and essays, Cooper defended
the government and people of the United States against
European critics of aristocratic leanings—-even though the

770 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

conduct of the radical elements in Andrew Jackson's farmer-
labor party was so hateful for him to contemplate that he
opposed all such factions at home.

§

With regard to domestic affairs, as distinguished from
the opposition of American civilization to that of other
lands, the speculative and imaginative literature of the mid-
dle period, in so far as it dealt with the realities of Ameri-
can life, reflected all the issues of political economy and
natural science thrown up in the seething democracy of the
age. Far away on the right, the conservative agricultural
thought of the period—forming one antithesis to the
Hamilton-Webster-Clay system—was mirrored in the noy-
els of Simms and Cooper.

The former, born in South Carolina and in his later years
a slave owner and planter, represented in fiction the eco-
nomics that Calhoun represented in politics. An opponent
of tariffs and internal improvements, he became with the
passing years an ardent advocate of secession as the price
of economic freedom. With the same facile adjustment
to concrete circumstance, Simms adopted the current de-
fense of chattel slavery. ‘‘We beg once for all to say,” he
wrote defiantly in language echoing Calhoun’s doctrines, ‘‘to
our northern readers, writers, and publishers, that in the
South we hold slavery to be an especially and wisely de-
vised institution of heaven; devised for the benefit, the
improvement, and safety, morally, socially, and physically,
of a barbarous and inferior race.” Believing slavery sound
in morals, a champion of planting against industrialism,
Simms gave his southern readers food seasoned to their
palates. His novel, Guy Rivers, to use an illustration,
presented to South Carolinians a planting gentleman for
a “worn out English lord’ and a Georgia outlaw for a
“robber baron of the middle ages.’ In their ensemble,
his writings drew a clear picture of southern aristocratic
society, with its strong penchant for fighting men, fair

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 771

women, fine sentiments, and moonlit romance. Even the
very exuberance of his rhetoric merely flowered from the
same stem as southern oratory. In the identical rhythmic
category with Simms may be placed his friend and co-
worker, Beverley Tucker, Virginia gentleman, jurist, and
scholar, author of The Partisan Leader, a novel of peculiar
power, defending the southern cause, and foretelling seces-
sion a decade before the event.

With equal fidelity the spiritual aspirations of the dying
agricultural aristocracy of the Hudson River Valley gleam
through the pages of Cooper. Springing from the landed
patricians of New York, he inherited with his family es-
tate his father’s contempt for “‘the rabble.’’ By economic
origins, therefore, he was thrown into temperamental
opposition to the financial and industrial classes for whom
Daniel Webster’s grand orations were delivered; and his
early prepossessions were fortified by long sojourns in Eu-
rope where surviving feudalism was still strong enough to
check the pretensions of the machine man.

To the end of his days, Cooper disliked the money-
making bourgeois. With the true instinct of a landed gen-
tleman, he regarded trade as “vulgar,” and despised “the
wine-discussing, trade-talking, dollar-dollar set” of New
York City—which accounted for a great deal of the curs-
ing he received at the hands of certain metropolitan editors.
Through the pages of his Monikins the passions of the fight
glow like smoldering fire. Of necessity, accordingly,
Cooper rejected the Hamilton-Webster party and joined
the Democrats, even daring in flashing articles to defend
Andrew Jackson against the Senate—a thing as shocking
to the “Best People” of New York as the defense of Wil-
liam Jennings Bryan in the great age of Marcus A. Hanna.

And yet for all that, much as Cooper hated the money
changers, he had a contempt no less bitter for the rank and
file of Jackson’s farmer-labor party. Though agricultural
in his sentiment, he was not agrarian—no debt-burdened
plowman. Ina tale of the anti-rent riots waged by tenants

772 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

at the expense of the great landlords of the Hudson Valley,
he gave vent to his feelings against the levelers—the
Gracchi, the Shayses, Bryans, and LaFollettes of his time.
‘The column of society,” he warned his readers in a preface,
‘‘must have its capital as well as its base. It is only perfect
while each part is entire and discharges its proper duty.
In New York, the great landholders long have, and do still,
in a social sense, occupy the place of the capital. . . . We
would caution those who now raise the cry of feudality and
aristocracy to have a care of what they are about.”
Cooper’s Ways of the Hour was frankly written ‘‘to draw
the attention of the reader to some of the social evils that
beset us,’ especially those springing from the course of
democracy. “In trials between railroad companies and
those who dwell along their lines,” he lamented, “prejudice
is usually so strong against the former that justice for them
is nearly hopeless.”
§

For the industrial right there were few novelists who ven-
tured to draw near the all-devouring, all-becoming vortex,
and justify its ways to mankind. In fact it was a bit too.
ruthless for mellowed men of letters; but its beneficiaries
were not without sympathy in literary circles. If Oliver
Wendell Holmes protested to James Russell Lowell that
he was not “a thorough-going conservatist,’ he was none
the less disinclined to be disturbed by the clamors of Jack-
son’s democracy for what it pleased to call “‘justice.”’ His
general conspectus of the social order was neatly summed
up in the following oracular statement made at the Break-
fast Table: ‘“The spiritual standards of different classes I
would reckon thus: (1) the comfortably rich; (2) the de-
cently comfortable; (3) the very rich, who are apt to be
irrelicious; (4) the very poor, who are apt to be immoral.”

When taken to task for neglecting the agitations of his
day looking to the improvement of the lot of the poor,
Holmes replied: “I believe I have never treated them

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 773

unkindly in any way. Iam sure that I feel a deep interest
in all well-directed efforts for improving their condition,
and am ready to lend my cordial support to such practical
measures as furnishing them better dwellings and similar
movements.” In the main, however, he was personally
opposed to all the radical currents of his age, currents
which on the one side created the Jacksonian uproar among
the masses and on the other the socialistic furor among the
intellectuals—Lowell, Curtis, Emerson, and Ripley, for
example. Against the abolitionist appeal Holmes was
equally dead set, holding until the eve of the Civil War that
‘we must reach the welfare of the blacks through the
dominant race.”’

Not in the same class as an artist in polite letters, but
far more outspoken in his championship of the Hamilton-
Webster system was John Pendleton Kennedy, the Balti-
more novelist, friend of Thackeray and Poe. From start
to finish a thoroughgoing Whig, Kennedy attacked ‘‘the
dangerous principles” of Jackson’s administration, sup-
ported protection and the bank, cheered for Henry Clay,
and entered Congress as a devoted member of his party.
It is true that his best known pieces of fiction, Swallow Barn
and Horse-Shoe Robinson, are by no means stereotypes of
his political opinions; but his Quodlibet: Containing some -
Annals thereof, by Solomon Secondthought Schoolmaster
is a broad satire on Jacksonian politics, written in a diffuse,
bombastic style appropriate to the theme—and to the cam-
paign of 1840, the year of its publication. In no way
a foe of those sound old planting Whigs of Virginia, whose
sympathies were with Webster rather than Jackson, Ken-
nedy was primarily a friend of the new commercial and:
industrial order, loyal perhaps to the mercantile traditions
in which he was reared. —

In that general direction also leaned Washington Irving,
son of a New York merchant, although he, like Oliver
Wendell Holmes, rather shrank from the fierce battles of
the forum. Early in life he declared himself ‘“‘an admirer

774 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

of General Hamilton and a partisan with him in politics,”
and in his latter years he avowed an equally deep admira-
tion for Daniel Webster, from whom he received an ap-
pointment as minister to Great Britain. Though, during the
high tide of Jacksonian Democracy, Irving softened in his
antipathy for “popular politics,’ he declined Democratic
nominations to public office in New York and a place in
Van Buren’s Cabinet.

At no time did Irving betray any sympathy for the
farmer-labor wing of the Jacksonian army. On the con-
trary, he confessed in 1838 to “a strong dislike for some
of those loco-foco luminaries who have of late been urging
strong and sweeping measures subversive of the interests
of great classes in the community. . . . I always distrust
the soundness of political councils that are accompanied by
acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great class
of our fellow citizens. Such are those urged to the dis-
advantage of the great trading and financial classes of our
country.’ In other words, with relation to Cooper’s “‘trade-
discussing, dollar-dollar set,’ Irving was on the opposite
side of the arena.

§

Off to the left of Cooper, Holmes, and Irving—a sympa-
thetic, though not passionately whole-hearted advocate of
Jacksonian Democracy and its tendencies—was Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the starveling author of Salem, poorer in purse
in his early days than perhaps half the voters who cast their
ballots for “Old Hickory.” In a truly democratic spirit,
Hawthorne accepted the people, instead of patronizing
them after the fashion of the Brook Farm reformers.
Moreover, he voted the Democratic ticket, called himself a
Democrat, and was lifted out of semi-starvation by an
appointment to a federal job in the customs service under
Jackson’s beneficent spoils system.

And this was perfectly natural. Hawthorne had no
more faith in aristocracies of land or riches than had Jack-

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 775

son; like the General he belonged to neither. ‘The truth
is,” he said in The Scarlet Letter, “‘that once in every half-
century, at longest, a family should be merged in the great,
obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.
Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in
subterranean pipes.”

Far from accepting at face value high-toned doctrines
about the rich and well-born, Hawthorne had about as
much reverence for the infallibility of superior persons as
any humble professor of the Jacksonian creed. Once when
dilating upon the fate of old Matthew Maule, executed for
the crime of witchcraft, he remarked with a kind of cold
precision: “He was one of the martyrs to that terrible
delusion, which should teach us, among its other morals,
that the influential classes, and those who take upon them-
selves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the
passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest
mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen—the wisest, calmest,
holiest persons of their day—stood in the inner circle round
about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood,
latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”

Certainly none of the persons, classes, institutions, or
practices that agitated the Democrats and their reforming
wings entirely escaped Hawthorne’s pages—''this crowd
of pale-cheeked, slender girls who disturb the ear with the
multiplicity of their short dry coughs . . . seamstresses
who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the service |
of master tailors and close-fisted contractors until now it is
almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud.
. . . The prison, the insane asylum, the squalid chamber of
the almshouse, the manufactory where the demon machinery
annihilates the human soul, and the cottonfield where God’s
image becomes a beast of burden.”

And in a realistic spirit Hawthorne discarded the high
theorizing of the transcendentalists. What did a Demo-
crat and an office holder need with that frail support? In

776 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

a brief but grinning paragraph, he disposed of the mystical
Kant: “At the end of the Valley, as John Bunyan mentions,
is a cavern, where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope
and Pagan, who had strewn the ground about their resi-
dence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These vile
old troglodytes are no longer there; but in their deserted
cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes
it his business to seize upon honest travelers, and fat them
for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine,
raw potatoes and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and
is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his
features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the
chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant, that neither he for
himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe
them.”

Still beyond Hawthorne, far beyond him, on the left, the
ebullient and unreserved Whitman celebrated a whole-
souled and jubilant faith in democracy, accepting and loving
the masses as he found them, good, bad, and indifferent—
Jackson’s farmers and mechanics, rough of jacket and
boisterous of word. Son of a farmer and apprenticed to
a carpenter, was he not attuned to catch the rebellious
spirit of the times? At all events, in Whitman the ferment-
ing democracy of the age was incarnate; singing of America,
he sang of himself, a spokesman of a pushing and defiant
working class.

“Not a dilettante democrat,’ he said—‘‘a man who is
a double part with the common people and with immediate
life—who adores streets—loves docks—loves to talk with
free men—loves to be called by his given name and does
not care that any one calls him Mister. Knows how to
laugh with laughter—loves the rustic manner of workers—
does not pose as a proper man, neither for knowledge or
education—eats common food, loves the strong smelling
coffee of the coffee sellers in the market, at dawn—loves to
eat oysters bought from the fisherman’s boat, loves to be
one of a party of sailors and workers—would quit no matter

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 1777

what time a party of elegant people to find the people who
love noise, vagrants, to receive their caresses and their
welcome, listen to their rows, their oaths, their ribaldry,
their loquacity, their laughing, their replies—and knows
perfectly how to preserve his personality among them and
those of his kind.”’ |

Born on American soil, Whitman dedicated his genius
to it. ‘‘These states,’’ he exclaimed, ‘‘conceal an enormoug
beauty, which native bards not rhymers manipulating sylla-
bles and emotions imported from Europe should justify by
their songs, tallying themselves to the immensity of the
continent, to the fecundity of its people, to the appetite of
a proud race, fluent and free.”

The swiftness with which Whitman’s contemporaries re-
sponded to his melody and his strong notes confirmed him
in his course. If Whittier thrust the first volume of Whit-
man poetry into the fire as something shockingly unclean,
others of more patience and larger discernment saw gold
shining through the dross. The ethereal Emerson sent a
copy of Leaves of Grass to a friend with the words:
‘‘Americans who are abroad can now return: unto us a man
is born.”

To Whitman himself the Concord sage sent fine words
of praise: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit
and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very
happy in reading it as great power makes me happy. It
meets the demand I am always making of what seems the
sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too
much lymph in the temperament were making our western
wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave
thought. I have great joy init. I find incomparable things
said incomparably well, as they must be.” ‘Thoreau, though
a sworn foe of the cities and mobs which Whitman praised,
also paid tribute, declaring that the new author was the
greatest democrat the world had seen, suggested something
superhuman, and was the grand type. Bryant, then en-
grossed in his editorial labors and work as a good citizen,

778 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

often went over to Brooklyn to walk and talk with the
unconquerable American.

Before many years, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Tennyson
saw a new planet swimming within their ken, and in the
fullness of time, as the democratic surge shook thrones
and classes, there were idolators and imitators the world
over—in far off Japan, where ardent young students read
Whitman’s lines in the original tongue or in the soft
cadences of Arishima’s translation.

Appreciating on one hand the democratic spirit voiced by
Whitman and yet afhliated by birth and training with the
culture of the Hamilton-Webster economy, James Russell
Lowell was to the end of his days torn by conflicting emo-
tions, by his love of esthetics and letters, and by his anxiety
over the swift advance of industrialism in New England
and slavery in the South. Early in his life he became
entangled almost against his will in all the currents of agi-
tation and opinion that surged through the society of the
period. Taking the New England dialect as an instrument
for his Biglow Papers, he attacked the Mexican War in
vitriolic lines that scalded and seared the fustian patriots,
the president of the peace society who rushed to the sup-
port of war, the demagogue who made votes out of it, and
the “two-faced politicians’ who throve by it—blasted them
with a wrath that would have landed him in jail had he
performed the ceremony in the era of “the new freedom.”

About the same time Lowell wrote a letter to Oliver
Wendell Holmes in which he put himself on record against
war as a general proposition, against slavery, in favor of
temperance, in favor of ameliorating the lot of the poor
and reform in the large—foreshadowing a day when he was
to describe socialism as a kind of applied Christianity. No
matter how strong the artistic, classical, and traditional
pull in his nature, Lowell never could resist the call of con-
temporary voices or forbear taking nervous glances into
the future. If he was zealous in searching the past, he was
equally eager in scanning the horizon. “My poems have

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 779

thus far had a regular and natural sequence,” he wrote in
1850. ‘First Love and the mere happiness of existence
beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom—both
being sides which Beauty presented to me—and now I am
going to try more after Beauty herself. Next, if I live,
I shall present Life as I have seen it.” In homelier lines
he expressed his inner conflict: I

There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme.
The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching

Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching.

Beyond the extreme confines of the left wing, beyond the
reach of every ‘“‘practical’’ concern labored David Henry
Thoreau—ever to be remembered as the author of Walden
—who like Whitman was true to the farmer-mechanic order
from which he sprang. Deft with his own hands in garden
and workshop, simple in taste as any rustic, desiring few
things and able to secure them easily, Thoreau was as far
removed from the over-elaborate manners of the rich
bourgeois as from those of the slave-owning planter. He
was of New England but no part of the great audience that
cheered Daniel Webster. To him the huge Gothic retaining
walls of an industrial and financial society were immense
weights on the human spirit—a spirit born to be free in
field, forest, and stream.

So he rejected both church and state, their dened
taxes, orders, fulminations, ceremonies, and pretensions,
laughing at politics as dull futility—except where positively
harmful—and orthodox religious professions as something
entirely outside the range of intelligent human beings.
“Know ye, all men by these presents,’ he once solemnly
announced, “that I Henry Thoreau do not wish to be re-
garded as a member of any incorporated society which I
have not joined.” ‘The state of Massachusetts commanded
him to pay taxes for the support of the church; he refused
and was imprisoned for his contumacy. A poll tax he like-

780 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

wise declined to pay and for that disobedience he also spent
a night in jail.

Fiercely, with all the temper of one brought up as a
child of nature, Thoreau resented the intrusions of a ma-
chine civilization, its routine, its brick walls and streets, its
everlasting output of commodities, still more commodities,
burying mankind alive in things and laws. ‘‘No truer Amer- .
ican existed than Thoreau,’”’ once exclaimed Emerson; and
he might have added ‘of primitive field and forest days,
suffused with pagan culture.”

§

Among the dissenters, himself apart from them all, taking
the whole range of contemporary things within his catholic
sweep, Ralph Waldo Emerson was easily first in penetration
and high expression. Like Goethe he was no philosopher,
in that he made no system after the fashion of Kant or
Hegel; but, as Carlyle would say, by his flashing rush light
he illuminated all corners of this dark vale. Six years
before Marx and Engels startled Europe with their famous
announcement that history is the story of class struggles,
Emerson, in a lecture on The Conservative, delivered in
Boston in 1841, declared: ‘“The two parties which divide
the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation,
are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world
ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil
history. The conservative party established the reverend
hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The
battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and
colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of
the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times.
The war not only rages in battlefields, in national councils,
and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man’s bosom
with opposing advantages every hour.”

No one in his time understood better the intimate relation
of property to politics. ‘We might as wisely reprove the

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 781

east wind, or the frost,” he calmly remarked in his essay
on Politics, ‘“‘as a political party, whose members: for the
most part could give no account of their position but stand
for the defence of those interests in which they find them-
selves. . . . Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circum-
stance and not of principle; as, the planting interest in
conflict with the commercial; the party of capitalists and
that of operatives.”

When it came to their merits, he thought that the con-
servative party, ‘“composed of the most moderate, able, and
cultivated part of the population, is timid and merely
defensive of property,” and that Daniel Webster, the high
priest of conservatism, was an exponent of property interests
and fleshly living. In the circumstances, Emerson thought
that ‘“‘the philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will,
of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat for free
trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties
in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the
access of the young and the poor to the sources of power
and wealth.’”’ But he was under no idealistic delusions. On
the contrary he looked upon the popular party with sus-
picion, as destructive and selfish in its aims, without ulterior
and divine ends, lacking in those qualities that give hope and
virtue to democracy.

Standing on this broad philosophic platform, Emerson
slashed out in every direction—in poem, essay, and lecture
—as the issues of the passing pageant filed before him.
At an hour when Massachusetts respectability was as silent
as the grave, he struck resounding blows at slavery as an
institution. In the midst of the agitation over the public
schools, he exclaimed that the furor about education among
the rich, who had so long neglected the poor, sprang from
a desire to subdue the rising generation to the dominion of
law and order. ‘The cause of education is urged in this
country with utmost earnestness—on what ground? Why,
on this, that the people have the power and if they are not
instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading,

‘@

782 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the
same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair
pageant of Judicature and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred
muniments of wealth itself and new distribute the land.”
Nothing silenced him, no institutional fear.

Then to the horror of the orthodox, he went on: ‘‘Re-
ligion is taught in the same spirit. . . . If you do not value
the Sabbath or other religious institutions, give yourself
no concern about maintaining them. They have already
acquired a market value as conservators of property; and
if priest and church members should fail, the Chambers of
Commerce and the presidents of the banks, the very up-
holders and landlords of the country would muster with fury
to their support.”

Committed to this realistic view of the political and social
scene, Emerson not unnaturally departed from current con-
ventions in matters theological. ‘Trained for the ministry,
he left it after a few brief years for a life of literary free-
dom—for his world pulpit at Concord, where he spoke his
mind as things came to him, to the great distress of most
persons glued to reputability. Arriving at God through
reason and nature—with the assistance of his heritage and
Immanuel Kant—Emerson discarded, gently but firmly,
most of the orthodox Christian tradition, so firmly in fact
that, for an address delivered at the Divinity College in
1838, he was officially excluded from speaking at Harvard
for nearly thirty years. Having put aside prescriptive
articles of faith, running one, two, three, and so forth,
Emerson remained all the rest of his days, as he said, “‘a
chartered libertine,” free to speculate on God and man as
the foliation of his mind decreed.

Emancipated from all theological fetters, Emerson was
prepared to grasp the implications of the new science, espe-
cially the notion of evolution, and its bearings upon life
and letters. As early as 1833 he visited the Jardin des
Plantes in Paris where Buffon and Lamarck had labored
so patiently with such fruitful results; and not long after-

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 783

wards he began to study both the developmental doctrines
of the ancients and the bold hypotheses of the pioneers who
were making smooth the way for Darwin. Several years
before the Origin of Species appeared, Emerson discovered
that the concept of evolution, in the general sense of change
or progress as distinguished from Darwin’s specific theory
of causation, was destined to have a subversive effect on all
theories of life, conduct, and religion.

In this connection, his penetrating discernment, as well as
his varied knowledge, was amazing; his prescience was
equally astonishing. In many passages of his works, the
influence of the flying sparks of science was traced—with
particular succinctness in his lecture on Poetry and Imagina-
tion delivered in 1854. ‘‘This magnificent hotel and con-
veniency we call Nature is not final,’ he said. ‘‘First
innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps are given,
suggesting that nothing stands still in nature but death;
that the creation is on wheels in transit. . . . Thin or solid
everything is in flight. . . . I believe this conviction makes
the charm of chemistry—that we have the same avoirdupois
matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and
in animal transformation not less, as in grub and fly, in egg
and bird, in embryo and man; everything undressing and
stealing away from its old into new form, and nothing fast
but those invisible cords which we call laws on which all
is strung. Then we see that things wear different names
and faces, but belong to one family; that the secret cords
or laws show their well-known virtue through every variety,
be it animal or plant or planet, and the interest is gradually
transferred from the forms to the lurking method... .
All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy,
osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each
kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to
the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate,
mollusk, articulate, vertebrate up to man; as if the whole
animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit
the genesis of mankind.” ‘These words were uttered in

784 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

America five years before the Origin of Species rolled from
the press!

Moreover, Emerson saw the coming revolution to be
wrought in social thinking by the new scientific doctrine even
before Herbert Spencer worked it out in close detail. ‘The
hint of unity and development,” he remarked in the lecture
just referred to, ‘“‘upsets our politics, trade, customs, mar-
riages, nay, the common sense side of religion and literature
which are founded on low nature—on the clearest and most
economical mode of administering the material world con-
sidered as final.” Many years afterward, in repeating this
lecture, Emerson had merely to add a reference to the
theories of Darwin announced since its original delivery.
He had, of course, given an optimistic and lofty tone to
the new gospel, afhliating it with, rather than substituting
it for, the high philosophy of transcendentalism; but that
did not identify him with the clergy of the traditional
schools.

As he frankly said himself, the new view of nature ran to
the roots of old religious dogma: ‘The narrow sectarian
cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his
church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of his church.”
The word had gone forth; a few had heard it; it could
not be recalled.

Around Emerson, at various distances, gathered groups
of reformers and speculators, dubbed by some one ‘The
Transcendental Club,” who made experiments in communal
living at Brook Farm and in journalism with The Dial,
wrote essays, lectured, and preached—among them sev-
eral of the first thinkers of New England, such, for ex-
ample, as Bronson Alcott, O. A. Bronson, W. H. Channing,
Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and ‘Theodore
Parker. If, as some wit said, they were like-minded in that
no two of them thought alike, they managed to make quite
a stir among the intellectual classes of the period.

For the feminists Margaret Fuller spoke in new lines,
carrying the political theories of Mary Wollstonecraft into

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 785

the stage of social and economic exposition, and demon-
strating by her wide knowledge of continental literature and
her critical powers—as editor of The Dial for a time and
then as special writer for Horace Greeley’s Tribune—that
women could be fair competitors of the leading men in
matters of taste and opinion. For the experimenters who
vainly imagined that the evils of industrial society were to
be uprooted by the establishment of communities on utopian
socialist lines, Bronson Alcott gave demonstrations, thereby
helping to dispel unintentionally the communistic dreams of
his generation. Although Alcott’s colony Fruitlands, like
the more pretentious scheme, Brook Farm, failed, as prac-
tical persons had predicted, it made reverberations in edu-
cational theory that outlasted the century. If, as scornful
editors said, the promoters of The Dial were “‘zanies, con-
siderably madder than the Mormons,” the magazine, in
fact, compared favorably in style and substance with the
more bulky and lumbering reviews of England and the
heavy magazines of the United States, containing articles
more pertinent to life, as the future showed, than many a
successful contemporary.

Had it not been for the slavery agitation ending in the
crash of the Civil War, there is no doubt that the humaniz-
ing and urbanizing thought of the left-wing professors of
letters would have given an entirely different direction to
the intellectual life of the United States during the closing
decades of the nineteenth century. But as things turned out
no small part of the literary energies of the middle period
were diverted to the slavery question. It haunted Lowell
even when he explored the classics; it embittered Thoreau’s
already sharp antipathy to the state; it stirred Emerson to
his angriest moods; it inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe
to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that was in the nature
of things narrow in its range and transitory in its appeal,
but a sensation in its day.

To John G. Whittier, slavery was an overpowering issue
that appeared at every facet of his mind. Discovered by

786 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

that arch agitator, William Lloyd Garrison, and early en-
listed in the abolition cause, Whittier could find little heart
in making verses for its own sake. While yet a boy, he
declared that he would rather be a Wilberforce than a
Byron; and drawn with all the intensity of his nature into
the contest over slavery, he could only think of the bondmen
entitled, as he said, to a full share in the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man. Like Lowell, he admitted his
prime concern in that issue of the living present:
And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who with a mission to fulfill,
Had left the muses’ haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong.

If with the passing of slavery reams of Whittier’s verses
became mere historic documents, if the remainder were dis-
missed by severe critics as nursery rhymes and rustic jingles,
it remained true that the son of a farmer-mechanic etched
the life of the great body of home-owning yeomanry, indus-
trious and God-fearing, with a surer hand than Whitman.
If the “Good Gray Poet” was a true singer of street car .
conductors and engineers, their manners and morals,
Whittier, in spite of his preoccupation with slavery, was the.
true singer of plowmen, haymakers, and farm housewives.
Those who have passed a long northern winter in a lonely
homestead shut in by the chill embargo of the snow know
with what vraisemblance the poet caught the scene and its
moods.

§

Though it is a fact that the great creators of speculative
and imaginative literature moved in some relation to the
conflicts that engaged the attention of politicians and jour-
nalists and can be understood only in that relation, it does
not follow, of course, that the literature of the time is to be
classified under the head of social economy. Far from it.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 787

While subtle emotions arising from their economic status
colored in a myriad ways the work of men like Cooper,
Simms, Irving, and Lowell, it did not follow that their prime
concern every instant was the relevance of their work to the
issues of the hour. ‘That would be to assume a logical in-
tensity of conviction never found in matters literary. On
the contrary, in spite of the machine, science, slavery, and
the clash of planter, manufacturer, operative, and farmer,
all the old interest in problems of human destiny, roughly
grouped as religious, in dramatic tales of hair-raising adven-
ture, in the classical past, in sublimated gossip (the chief
intellectual amusement of the human race), and in the
diversities of American life on land and sea were fed by the
imaginative writers of the middle period. Considered from
that point of view, it can be said that no phase of American
culture escaped their scrutiny. ‘The times may be recon-
structed through their eyes.

In New England, where the dissolving effect of science,
secular thought, and the machine process upon inherited
customs was the most acute, it was only natural that re-
ligious ideas and above all Puritan obsessions should be sub-
jected to merciless analysis. That was the psychological
operation that absorbed the highest talents of Hawthorne.
Disillusioned by his experience with communal living at
Brook Farm, caught in the swirl of surrounding skepticism,
he became a student of manners and morals.

With merciless steel Hawthorne, the Democrat, dissected
the conduct of the great and good, the high and respectable;
with unerring accuracy he portrayed the pillars of society
as executioners in unjust causes. In the same mood of the
physician, he explored the deep recesses of the Puritan con-
science, its fear of sin, its hard practical sense, its associa-
tion of Providence with expediency and success. He also
inquired into the new liberalism which, after rejecting estab-
lished creeds, embarked without compass or rudder on the
transcendental ship; and he considered the relation of the
dissolving philosophy to Puritan culture. For sin, it offered

788 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

self-reliance; for hell or heaven, it offered compensation;
for authority, it offered freedom of thought—a procedure
very disturbing to those who had a naive scheme of salva-
tion—but Hawthorne pursued his way to a logical conclu-
sion without any support from Emerson’s buoyant optimism.
Indeed he may be called the realistic novelist of the crum-
bling order for which the Concord sage furnished the
philosophy.

Another phase of Puritan dissolution was mirrored in
the elusive lines of Emily Dickinson, secluded Amherst poet,
who, after a sacrificial love affair, retired within her house
and garden to brood upon the substance and mystery of
life. With a certain relevance, she has been likened to a
Hindu adept pondering in solitude over infinity, but the
analogy is not altogether precise because an uncanny wit
shines through her wonderment. ‘To multiply the harbors
does not reduce the sea . . . No message is the utmost
message, for what) we: tell: is done’ ..\/ Ina? lite that
stopped guessing, you and I should not feel at home .. .
A lonesome fluency abroad, like suspended music . . . To
be singular under plural circumstances is a becoming hero-
ism.”’ In such vein did she too criticize the smooth and easy
creed. And she did it with transparent sincerity, without
pose and without care, for Emily Dickinson allowed none
of her work to be published during her life, sought no
applause, attended no banquets in her honor.

No less accurately were the physical setting for the Amer-
ican adventure and the manners of the several sections
drawn by the writers of imaginative literature. New Eng-
land, material and spiritual, is spread out before us in the
pages of Hawthorne, New York in the stories of Cooper,
the planting South in the novels of Tucker, Simms, and Ken-
nedy, the southwestern frontier in the sketches of Joseph
Glover Baldwin, David Crockett, and Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet, and the Middle West in the turgid romances
of James Hall and the clever etchings of Caroline Kirkland.
Even the far Southwest over against the borders of Mexico

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 789

was celebrated in the clear notes of Albert Pike’s prose
and poetry.

If we want to see a fine old plutocrat, we can find him
in English guise in Cooper’s Monikins. The slave-owning
planter of the grand style passes through his manorial
halls in Kennedy’s Swallow Barn or a Sojourn in the
Old Dominion. The lively horsetraders, planters, farmers,
slaves, and poor whites of the Far South throng Long-
street’s Georgia Scenes; while the shrewd pushing planters
and lawyers of Alabama and Mississippi, too clever by far
for old-fashioned Virginia gentlemen, live again in Bald-
win’s Flush Times. In the rough-hewn pages of David
Crockett’s Autobiography the political scenes of the frontier
are preserved for all time.

Nor was the sea neglected. The middle period was the
era of romantic maritime enterprise when clipper ships car-
ried American trade into distant waters, enriching whole
towns with the wealth of Cathay. And the hardy sailors
who raised their anchors, unfurled their canvas, careened
in the breeze, rounded every cape, and visited every port
deserved—and found—their epic makers. In 1841,
Richard Henry Dana, after two vivid years before the
mast, brought the sea, the deck, the yardarm, the smell of
salt and tar, and the drama of wide water-spaces to the
door of every landlubber in a story that charmed the
readers of his day and will live as long as the tongue in
which it is written.

Out of wider and deeper experiences, out of a more
playful and mystic nature, Herman Melville evolved still
more powerful tales of life on the rolling deep. Renouncing
the easy ways of clerks and merchants, he deliberately chose
the hardships and oppressions of the forecastle, exchanging
the dull routine of the quill and ledger for the excitements
of shipwrecks, riots, mutinies, and cannibals. Moby
Dick, wrought in the golden age of the sailing vessel, pub-
lished in 1851, was a thrilling narrative, suffused by whimsy,
doubts, and mystery that seemed to symbolize an eternal

790 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

enmity between man and nature and yet suspend the reader
between fact and fancy. So rich in color and philosophy
was this romance that Melville could never again rise to
the same height. Beyond all question he is one of the
noteworthy figures of universal literature—though it was
left for this generation to write his biography and pay full
tribute to his genius.
§

While innumerable forces tended to direct American
literary interest to domestic problems and themes, there
were others which worked for continual subordination of
the American mind to classical and contemporary European
modes. Among them none was more potent than the use
of the English tongue for it gave the American people
immediate access to the established literature of Britain
and helped to perpetuate in letters the provincial status that
had been repudiated in politics by the war for independ-
ence. English writers still set models and styles; English.
criticism was keenly felt and usually disparaging; English
praise was hungrily sought; and all this meant efforts to
conform to sentiments alien to New World life, whether
the conservatism of Sir Walter Scott and Sydney Smith or
the radicalism of Byron and Shelley.

Moreover, the absence of a copyright law strengthened
the yoke of foreign authority. Under the system then in
vogue, American publishers could “pirate” at pleasure the
works of English and European authors, that is, issue their
books in the United States without asking their consent
or paying them any royalties. As a consequence, foreign
novels, plays, poems, histories, and criticism were repro-
duced in numerous cheap editions, flooding the market with
a literature that was alien both in matter and in spirit in
many significant respects. Harpers, for instance, began to
publish in 1842 a library of select novels and, when the
number reached more than six hundred, only eight or ten
even then were the work of American authors.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 791

American magazines, following the same practice, filched
from their foreign contemporaries reviews, articles, and
criticisms without paying a penny for their copy. What was
the use of remunerating an American writer for commenting
on a book when a review by the best critic of the Old World
could be had for the taking? Of course in some instances
sensitive publishers asked for publishing rights and paid for
the privilege but competition was too strong to permit the
exercise of such nice virtues on a large scale. It was not
until 1891, when an international copyright law was wrung
from Congress by American authors and honorable pub-
lishers, that gentlemen eager to protect American pig iron
against English rivals consented to put letters on an equal
plane and sweep piracy from literature as it had been swept
from the high seas.

inspired by European examples, faced every day by
European competition in styles, and convinced that the
fundamental lines in prose and verse had been laid for all
time by the past, a number of American writers turned from
the economic and religious conflict that surged around them
to themes and rhythms of other lands. Some of them tried
their best to fit their strong sinews into the stiff armor of
European culture, daring to invite the Old World to ex-
amine their adaptability to its metal. Longfellow was of
this school. A collegian, trained in the classics, the first
importer of Dante, the president of the Dante Club at
Harvard, he preferred the elegance which Whitman
spurned. Whitman loved the divergent American language
with its twists and turns, its prickly colloquialisms. Long-
fellow was a professor of established languages, a maker
of textbooks, a lecturer on literature, fond of the middle
ages, a good academician, essentially derivative rather than
creative, true to conventional models even when writing
Hiawatha, the Indian saga.

Underneath his load of learning, he was still a Puritan
who shared the sentiments of the conservative, if not ortho-
dox, clergy. While Whitman chose to roam with the com-

792 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

monalty, Longfellow remained a serene teacher in a quiet
grove. Perhaps in that role he spoke to a wider audience of
his countryfolk engaged in farming and manufacturing than
did the roistering poet. At any rate he demonstrated that
an American could polish his lines, like any good Victorian,
and kindle some fire, even though he could not ‘“‘strike the
stars with his sublime head.”

If not as deeply absorbed in European culture as Long-
fellow, the creator of the first great poem written on the soil
of the United States, William Cullen Bryant, was in most
of his verses equally remote as a poet, not as a citizen,
from the uproar of the forum and marketplace. Starting
in his New England youth an aggressive Federalist, he later
became, as editor of the New York Evening Post, a mild
free-trade Democrat—to the high pleasure of the im-
porters, and then during the contest over slavery went over
to the Republican ranks.

But the passions of the political debate did not surge
through his rhythmic lines. Though often classed as a
Puritan by casual critics, there was nothing Puritanic in his
cosmic view of life as a solemn processional symbolizing
the unity of man and nature, ending in their complete fusion.
No doubt there were in Bryant many Puritan strains: cor-
rectness and serenity of private life, conscientious devotion
to the task of editing, deep interest in public affairs, eager-
ness to praise nobleness of example in writers and states-
men, firm faith in the worth of American citizenship, purity
of spirit, and respect for virtue. When all these qualities
were enumerated and all his lines surveyed there was no-
where to be found Cotton Mather’s rejoicing in the Provi-
dence of God or Roger Williams’ acquaintance with the
gentleness of Jesus. If the note of Thanatopsis is not that
of lofty pessimism then it would be difficult to find it
anywhere in universal literature.

That too was compatible with the stern discharge of duty
—plowing the furrow, as it was started in youth, with dig-
nity and contentment, to the end. Nor was it incompatible

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 793

with a many-sided mode of living. Bryant could unbend
in fairy tales and little lyrics of nature; he could rejoice in
long walks and talks with the exuberant Whitman; he could
serve as the councilor of statesmen. Still he was no in-
trepid knight thundering at turreted gates with an iron
mallet. Neither was he a languid esthete at home amid
the perfumes of a salon sustained by fixed investments.
Bryant was a substantial poet and a solid citizen.

At the opposite pole of temperament, though a warm
admirer of Bryant, was the most exotic poet of the middle
period, Edgar Allan Poe, in many ways unique. He did
not love his own time and habitat like Whitman, flee from
it like Longfellow, seek refuge in nature like Thoreau, or
rest serene in optimism like Emerson. With all the power
of his provocative intellect he sought a key to creative art
and at a time when hero worship was the vogue in American
literary circles, he so savagely attacked current modes that
he won for himself the title of ‘‘the tomahawk man.” Asa
critic he laid down dicta on the essence of wit, poetry, and
humor; when he wrote romance or verse he bowed to his
own rules.

Having defined poetry as ‘“‘the rhythmical creation of
beauty,’’ Poe subjected himself with ascetic zeal to the
laws of his own imagination, striving by mathematical cal-
culation and composition in tones to find the music of prose.
The result was not ideas but haunting, sonorous cadences
that were saved from banality by a deep note of mystery.
If, as Lowell said, two-fifths of Poe was ‘‘fudge,”’ the re-
mainder was powerful enough to make the age in which
he lived noted in the annals of ‘“‘beautiful’’ letters.

Among the romanticists who turned from American life
for their materials must be reckoned four or five of the most
distinguished historians of the period. After giving his
countrymen a substantial though not brilliant life of George
Washington, as if to pay a personal debt, Washington
Irving chose Spain for his second home, charming the
people of both nations with his story of Columbus and the

794 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Conquest of Granada. ‘Through years of travel, the moun-
tains and valleys, the waysides and inns, the streets of
crowded cities, and the quiet cloisters of monasteries in
Spain became as familiar to him as the scenes of his native
land; he loved ‘“‘the rich ore of old, neglected volumes”’ in
Spanish libraries even more than he did the newer manu-
scripts of his own young nation.

Likewise enamored of Spanish romance, William Hick-
ling Prescott chose the conquest of Mexico and Peru as,
the subject of his luminous expositions, writing with such
power that the authoritative scholars of Europe—Hallam,
Guizot, Milman, and Thierry—accepted him as a peer in
their realm. Given an alien bent early in life at the North-
ampton school of the German-trained Bancroft, James
Lothrop Motley, a bit soured on Jacksonian Democracy,
also exercised his talents on European material, adding a
vivid, if thoroughly respectable, volume to the mountainous
literature on the Dutch republic.

While confining his explorations mainly to this continent,
Francis Parkman chose the conflict between England and
France in North America for his deep and wide researches.
Released from narrow local ties by the riches of his father,
accumulated in the grocery business in Boston, George
Ticknor, a ripe scholar and prodigious worker, wrote a his-
tory of Spanish literature so erudite and so charming that
Macaulay recommended it to Queen Victoria. Thus in the
very age when Hegel, writing his profound philosophy of
history, saw in America a land of the future, some of the
finest historical minds in the United States could find their
most .engaging themes only in the storied past of other
countries.

§

The same interests, customs, conflicts which caught the
attention of authors, editors, and publishers, the same com-
petition with foreign appeals which ran through imaginative
literature in general had their counterparts in the theater,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 795

the romantic drama running parallel with the romantic
novel. From intellectual circles, the Puritan tabu had
now definitely passed, lingering only among the evangelical
sects wrestling with his satanic majesty on the frontier. So
pure to the pure had all things become in the very section
where once all things theatrical had been evil that even the
ballet was enjoyed by Transcendentalists.

In the extension of the dramatic field, mechanical factors
operated as effectively as in publishing. While money and
leisure built upon money, as usual, provided local patronage
for the drama, the development of railways and steam navi-
gation transformed the continent—indeed, the whole At-
lantic basin—into a theater for the production of plays.
Greater wealth, spread widely over the country, and rail-
ways made it possible for the most eminent players to move
swiftly from city to city, and encouraged capitalists to put
money into the amusement business, as into industrial stocks
and bonds—with such feverish haste in fact that overpro-
duction ensued, Philadelphia, for instance, having five
theaters fall into bankruptcy in a single season of 1828-29.

Before the period had come to a close, all the cities from
coast to coast were bidding for playwrights and players.
Scarcely had the miners of ’49 erected their shacks in Calli-
fornia when they declared that they must have a stage and
no sooner did they get rough boards nailed together in a
wooden hut than an Australian company arrived to present
Othello to the serious and a French vaudeville troupe to
raise boisterous laughter among the wielders of the pick.
With the help of the railway, Edwin Forrest, Joseph Jef-
ferson, James H. Hackett, and all the leading native actors
“toured” the country, at least east of the Mississippi, with
plays constructed in America included in their repertoire.

Had the railway developed without a correlative growth
in steam navigation, it is conceivable that the course of the
dramatic art in the United States would have been more
nationalist. Certainly the upheavals of the age, obtruding
themes, enthusiasm, and talent called into being native

796 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

work of genuine power, while American actors capable of
interpreting it gave their lives generously to the task of
production. But oceanic navigation brought a rush of
foreign performers with foreign plays to sue for favor
behind the footlights, among them such celebrities as
Edmund and Charles Kean, Charles Mathews, Junius
Brutus Booth, William Charles MacCready, and Charles
and Fanny Kemble, all with English plays in English inter-
pretations. New York being the chief port of entry, the
capitalists of the metropolis were quick to sense the size of
gate receipts that would flow from making the outlying
cities tributary to its successes. In this opportunity, the
‘‘star’’ system was created as a dramatic phase to business
enterprise, throwing the profit-making instinct on the side
of heavy importations and keeping the stamp of the
province on American work.

Pitted against foreign actors and candle plays, American
actors and playwrights had stubborn problems to face,
especially popular love of the exotic, continued emphasis on
the traditional, and respect for the authoritative. However
deep the actor’s desire to give voice to American issues and
psychology, he well knew from experience that his plays
must be all the more convincing and artistic when handling
the democratic theme. No one understood this better than
Edwin Forrest, whose loyalty to American life led him, by
personal appeal and by experiments in production, to stimu-
late the writers of Boston and Philadelphia—less sub-
merged than New York by the European flood—to strain
every nerve in creative work. So likewise James H.
Hackett, famous for his impersonation of American types,
though he loved Shakespeare’s rollicking figures, never
wearied in encouraging local playwrights. Even the poet
Longfellow devoted his graduating oration at Bowdoin to
an appeal for a greater appreciation of native drama and
tried his own ability in that field, but with a foreign con-
ception, The Spanish Student.

Under the stimulus of national idealism, in spite of for-

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 797

midable competition from every foreign quarter, at least
seven hundred plays by American authors were produced
before the close of the middle period in 1860. In all phases
the output represented an immense growth in dramatic in-
terest and power compared with the era of the early repub-
lic. Unhappily, however, owing to the absence of copy-
right protection, comparatively little of this work was ever
published, especially in the South, leaving posterity to
guess at its character and artistic competence. But from the
printed plays and from news reports it has been shown that
between 1825 and 1860 more than one hundred and fifty
plays were constructed on the events and personages of the
American Revolution alone; that all the economic and po-
litical struggles of the age invaded the actor’s art—the
battle over the Bank, the triumph of Jackson, campaigns of
Whigs and Democrats, disputes over Maine and Oregon
boundaries, the gold rush, the Mexican War, and the Mor-
mon migration to Utah; that among domestic plays Rip Pan
Winkle took the lead; and that Yankees, planters, farmers,
Negroes, countrymen, sailors, and townspeople were re-
peatedly, and often cleverly, portrayed.

It was significant that plays built around the theme of
the masses casting off the classes were among the most
popular dramas written and produced in America during
the time. With Europe repeatedly stirred by political up-
heavals and America roused first by the Jacksonian battle
and then by the struggle between planting and capitalism,
Richard Montgomery Bird, a Philadelphia playwright,
found the intellectual climate favorable to tragedy of a
popular cast. Responding to this appeal, he wrote The
Gladiator to celebrate the uprising of the slaves of Rome
against their masters; Pelopidas picturing the revolt of the
Thebans against Spartan tyranny and Oralloossa represent-
ing the Indian rebellion against Spanish conquerors. A
Whig and stanch opponent of slavery, Bird made abolition-
ist opinion leap from the tongue of Spartacus once more, in
the oratorical form still the vogue in that day:

798 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Death to the Roman fiends, that make their mirth
Out of the groans of bleeding misery!

Ho, slaves arise! it is your hour to kill.

Kill and spare not—for wrath and liberty!

Freedom for bondmen—freedom and revenge!

More than a thousand times, Edwin Forrest played The
Gladiator to cheering audiences in the North; and long
after Bird and Forrest were dead and the slaves of the
South had been emancipated, it still appeared on the boards
of New York.

Conceived in the same spirit and appealing to the demo-
cratic sentiments of the time, Robert IT. Conrad’s historical
play, Jack Cade, celebrating the courage of that Daniel
Shays of Tudor England in a portrayal of an uprising by
serfs and yeomen—as interpreted by Edwin Forrest—had
a run that must have pleased Andrew Johnson and his fol-
lowers. In short, the humors, gossip, customs, and deeper
passions of the middle period all found their way into the
theater, now accidentally, now subtly, now with gusto,
making it seem as if a thousand years had passed since
Jonathan Edwards preached damnation to the giddy.

§

Akin to the drama, especially on its operatic side, but
more sublimated, more remote from the hard rationalizing
processes of industry and science, the art of musical compo-
sition and production in America was subjected to even
greater competition from abroad. French, Italian, and
English opera companies boarded the swifter and safer
steamers for experiments in the American marketplace, and
singers and instrumentalists from Germany in particular
surged in to exploit the concert and teaching field. After
all, the roots of the world’s musical masterpieces then as
always lay deep in religious and martial sentiments older
than reason or trade, and America of the middle period was
essentially, almost crassly, economic.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 799

In any event, the American people were dominated by no
single church comparable to the state establishments of
Europe which gave unity to religious emotions and patron-
age to the correlative elaboration of devotional music.
Appealing primarily to farmers and mechanics, distrusting
large military and naval establishments, Jacksonian Democ-
racy, though it adored wars and military heroes, did not
nourish the continuous martial ardors that often stimulate
the production of music. In the rush and roar of economic
development, moreover, little place was left for the quiet
life of song and reflection conducive to lyrical compositions
and nowhere in the country could be found a rich folklore
upon which to build—save perhaps the elusive and exotic
Indian mythology.

In the metropolitan centers offering the concentration of
population necessary for esthetic appreciation and the
wealth for patronage, there was an extraordinary chaos in
historical backgrounds for musical development. Boston,
for example, long accustomed to the choral singing of
hymns, now moving out and on under the influence of re-
ligious liberalism through oratorios into the sphere of secu-
lar music, displayed a coldness for the feudalism of Euro-
pean opera. In New York, where the Protestant Episcopal
sect was strong and where Trinity Church had begun to
give oratorios in the early days of the republic, it was easier
to awaken an interest in anything Europe had to present,
especially the opera with its social corollaries. Representing
still a third type, the Quakers of Philadelphia had neither
vocal nor instrumental music in their religious worship nor
in the homes of the strict; nevertheless, with less of the
Puritan passion in their make-up, they found it a simple
matter to accept secular music when the Musical Fund
Society, organized in 1820, opened the symphonic era in
their city. It was New Orleans, Spanish and French in
origin, possessing riches for patronage, mainly Catholic
in religion, sustained under American possession by the
economy of semi-feudal landlords, that first welcomed

800 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

whole-heartedly French and Italian opera; for it was as far
removed from Boston and Philadelphia in musical taste as
it was in geography.

No city, however, had the conditions favorable to the
flowering of native talent in the temper and cast of the Old
World, even had such lain dormant. It was easier to make
money from cod and cotton and pay foreign musicians than
to foster native composition—if indeed by any method the
creative musical faculty could have been awakened at that
time. So leadership in such affairs passed naturally and
completely into the hands of Europeans, of Germans espe-
cially. ‘The father of American orchestral music,” for
instance, was a Hanoverian, Gottlieb Graupner, who, after
drifting through one of King George’s regiments to London
and thence to Charleston, South Carolina, eventually settled
in Boston the year of Washington’s death. There, with
the assistance of such local and alien players as were avail-
able, he organized the first orchestra credited to America.

Another German, Carl Zerrahn, who came to the United
States during the great exodus from his fatherland in 1848,
became the leader of the Handel and Haydn Society in
Boston and for more than forty years organized and con-
ducted orchestral and choral festivals in various parts of
the country, receiving in recognition an outpouring of money
and appreciation that was lavish in proportions. German
refugees also founded the Germania Orchestra, which gave
concerts in the leading cities and helped to raise the level
of orchestral music wherever budding experiments were
made. To Theodore Thomas of Hanover belongs perhaps
the highest honor of the middle period for enterprise and
success in driving the New World along the musical paths
of the Old; arriving in 1845, he inaugurated New York’s
first chamber concerts and devoted the remaining years of
his long career to the development of the art in America.
If none of these foreign musicians was a supreme master,
yet the people of the United States owe heavy debts to
them all.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 801

Great as was this obligation to foreigners, it would be
a mistake to overlook native participation and coéperation.
Certainly, on the side of promotion, Lowell Mason of
Massachusetts deserves a place in the chronicle. While
a clerk in a Georgia banking house, he made a compilation
of sacred music which won him immediate recognition; in
1827 he became the conductor of the young Handel and
Haydn Society in Boston and, after holding that post for
twenty-three years, transferred his interest with his resi-
dence to New York. As a compiler of church music, an
organizer of choral societies, a partner in an organ factory,
and an originator of conventions for the training of music
instructors in the public schools, Mason impressed himself
indelibly on the democracy of his time.

It would be an equal mistake, no doubt, to neglect the
efforts that were made to resist the foreign invasion and
the ‘‘systematized effort for the extinction of American
music’’—by the production of native composition. With this
ideal in mind, William H. Fry of Philadelphia and George
F. Bristow of Brooklyn attempted operatic flights. Fry’s
Leonora, performed in New York in 1858, was received
with great applause—an applause that died away with
ominous haste, however. Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle was
performed by one of the best of the foreign opera com-
panies only to meet the same fate. Nor did his oratorios
and symphonies prove to be more than transitory incidents
in American cultural history. If these native artists built
nothing enduring, if even they had to rely on European
models, they at least labored sincerely and with slight com-
mercial advantage to express and evoke creative genius in
their own country. Whatever their natural talents they had
to depend solely upon popular patronage, as few, if any, of
the great composers on the world’s roll had been forced
to do, and the verdict of the people was against them.

As seemed congruous in a democratic society bent on
raising the general level of culture, it was the institutions
for interesting and educating the populace that made the

802 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

striking music achievements of the day. Indeed the annals
of the time were crowded with entries recording the forma-
tion of societies, academies, schools, conservatories, and
publishing concerns devoted to this special art. Beginning
with the Handel and Haydn Society, which was organized
in Boston in 1815, successive decades saw the multiplication
of all sorts of associations for the promotion of music,
among the most notable being the Philadelphia Musical
Fund Society established in 1820, the Boston Academy of
Music in 1833, the New York Academy of Music in 1852,
the Milwaukee Musikverein in 1851, and the New York
Liederkranz in 1847. Popular enthusiasm was winning sup-
port also in institutions of learning where music courses
were added to the curriculum, Boston setting a brave
example in 1838 by introducing such instruction in the
public schools. Old Federalists who thought that the end
of the world had come when John Quincy Adams was re-
jected of Jacksonian Democracy could hardly say with
justice that the artistic sense of the nation had been extin-
guished with the advent of the masses to political power.

Even the commercial enterprise that made new fortunes
every year conspired in various ways to deepen the musical
interest of the millions. This was the age which witnessed
the rise of the regular manufacture of American pianos in
something approaching mass production under the leader-
ship of Jonas Chickering.

A cabinet-maker’s apprentice who tempted fortune by
going to Boston in 1818, Chickering joined the Handel
and Haydn Society, penetrated into the fascinations of
musical composition and instrument-making, and then em-
barked in business for himself. By numerous inventions, he
soon made the American piano known over the world for
its durability; while his business acumen put it on the market
at a relatively low figure. ‘Thus in making it possible for
thousands to have pianos where but a few had enjoyed
them before, Chickering contributed largely to the distribu-
tion of musical education and taste; and out of the riches

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 803

he acquired from the trade in the instrument itself, he gave
generous sums for the promotion of talent among the poor.
One of the by-products of his industry was national con-
centration on piano-playing and piano-composition—the
history of all music being interwoven with the instruments
in favor at various times and for specific reasons.

§

The sweep of economic and social forces which carried
America away from the cultural order of the colonial epoch,
touching even the esoteric realm of music, influenced still
more profoundly those arts which portrayed man and nature
—painting, sculpture, and drawing. In this sphere as in
music there was, of course, the cultural lag due to the load
of tradition and classical training but the march of events
was steady. Gentlemen of the old school who had fought a
losing battle with Jefferson and another with Jackson had
relied as firmly as any of Louis XIV’s courtiers on the
classics and on divinity for their verbal and moral support.
Just as they had opposed the westward advance of the
economic American empire under the drive of Jacksonian
farmers they had looked to Europe rather than to native
powers for guidance in matters of the spirit. To them the
right of the rich and well-born to rule in the arts was as
divine as the same right seemed to James I or Louis XIV
in matters political.

It was therefore as natural for the wielders of the brush
to carry on the ceremonial spirit of ‘Trumbull in painting
as for*certain manipulators of the pen to concentrate on
the classics. Indeed efforts to acclimatize traditional art
became more numerous as students were enabled by new
wealth and easier travel to study the old masters in Italy,
as more models and copies of antique art were imported
with the weakening of Puritan tabus, as rich patrons pro-
vided the means, and as schools in connection with the
academies began to train Americans on the classical basis.

804 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Of the artists of the middle period who painted in the
grand style, John Vanderlyn, blacksmith-apprentice of
Kingston, New York, won perhaps the most distinction,
receiving for his picture of Marius among the Ruins of
Carthage a medal from Napoleon the Great and for his
Ariadne applause from the students who copied in Rome.
In the same vogue sculpture, which now made its way with
the aid of native aspirants, offered national statesmen in
togas or with Greek draperies flung over frock coats and
cylindrical pants. If Tories could not make Washington
a king, they could at least make him over in the image of
a Roman senator or emperor. For artists who chose themes
out of a remote past unrelated to their own lives and times,
it seemed perfectly congruous to use Greek columns draped
with textiles as a background for heroic figures of American
politics.

But the philosophy and practice of the grand style in
art as in life had its antithesis. Faced by a monopoly of
divinity in the persons of their opponents everywhere, advo-
cates of democracy turned from God to nature for guidance
and inspiration. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who went on
before the democratic masses like a cloud by day and a
pillar of fire by night, had preached the gospel of emancipa-
tion through a return to nature. In a like vein Thomas
Jefferson, when he flung out the Declaration of Independ-
ence and blew the blast that echoed down through the
middle period, appealed first to “the laws of nature’? and
then to the laws of ‘‘nature’s God.” It was the more
devout and conservative brethren in the Continental Con-
gress of 1776 who compelled him to insert at the end, ‘‘with
a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”
What the democratic politician invoked for support—an
all-surrounding and all-sustaining nature—poets of the new
age celebrated and the men of science investigated with
relentless and revolutionary persistence.

With the appeal for a “natural” government, the es-
sence of democracy, as distinguished from an artificial

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 805

and ceremonial government, there ran also through the arts
a simple call for a return to nature. In Europe where revo-
lutionary upheavals of the thirties and forties were keeping
the intellectuals in excitement with the new ideas, American
students of art came into contact with the rebellious spirit.
And those who for one reason or other could not go
abroad saw the modes of Peale and Trumbull disintegrat-
ing at home under the fire of Jacksonian democracy, under
the influence of naturalism. With a flair for the temper of
the new age an American art critic exclaimed in 1853: ‘‘The
future spirit of our art must be inherently vast like our
western plains, majestic like our forests, generous like our
rivers.”

In response to just such moods the most distinctive work
was done by landscape artists, such as Frederick E. Church,
John F. Kensett, S. R. Gifford, Thomas Cole, and Homer.
D. Martin—a group of whom were known as _ the
Hudson River School on account of their intense preoccu-
pation with the scenes of that great valley. ‘Technically
deficient as their work was, and photographic in minutia,
still it could be said for them that they were nearer to
reality—that is, to subjects within the range of their com-
prehension—than the expatriates who worked in mythology
and the grandiose.

The shift of interest from imitative art was stimulated
by the new technical processes which revolutionized printing
and, besides making the reproductions of old masters in
cheap form available, widened the market and opportuni-
ties for American artists who cared to work with the living
things about them. ‘This was the age of budding maga-
zines, popular histories, travel books, gift books, and illus.
trated sets; it saw also the spread of the political cartoon.

And all this made for democracy in art, setting engravers
and artists to work to supply the demand of a nation be-
coming literate and curious about its own scenery, its own
people, urban and rural, Indians, city dwellers, rustics,
fiddlers, Negroes, dancers, and politicians. Besides the seri-

806 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

ous and somber work done for The National Portrait
Gallery of Distinguished Americans, issued in 1834-39, for
the grand family Bible brought out by Harpers in 1843,
‘embellished with a thousand historical engravings,” and
for the Atlantic Souvenir, the Baltimore Book, the Lady’s
Album, and a hundred more ephemeral volumes, there was
a perfect flood of political and social caricatures. In fact
from the drawings of the artists who interpreted the passing
show the politics and social life of the era could be recon-
structed, if its printed words were destroyed: Whigs,
Republicans, and Democrats, all the great figures from
Andrew Jackson up or down, woman’s rights, prohibition,
slavery, abolition, labor, socialism, Catholicism, Mormon-
ism, and Millerism.

In other directions than in the themes and affections of
painters, sculptors, and engravers, the scientific and in-
dustrial drive of the middle period counted heavily. If
domestic manufacturers were to get the full benefit of the
protective tariff and make headway against foreign impor-
tations in clothing, furniture, and material commodities
of every kind, they evidently needed the codperation of
artistic talent. Wath a closer reference to practical things,
with a frank avowal of competing with the Academy of
Fine Arts for public favor, the National Academy of Design
was founded in New York in 1825. Under the leadership
and inspiration of Samuel F. B. Morse, the painter-inventor,
open criticism was made of the rival institution, charging
its patrons and defenders with subservience to power, title,
and rank. Tangent also to business requirements were the
Philadelphia School of Design for Women opened in 1853
and the Cooper Institute of New York “devoted forever
to the union of art and science in their application to useful
purposes of life.’’ Already it had become apparent that
the handicrafts supported by apprenticeship had broken
down before the steel fingers and the factory mind of the
machine age and that some substitute comparable to the old
affection for the product would have to be devised, unless,

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 807

forsooth, all art was to perish in the dry decay of everlast-
ing copying.
§

The technical revolution which called into being the great
urban centers, created a huge working class, accelerated the
westward movement, spanned the region east of the Mis-
sissippi River with railways, and afforded a substantial basis
for nationalistic democracy—a technical revolution which in
short invaded every sphere—naturally destroyed the jour-
nalism of the handpress appropriate for local market towns
and pointed the way to the monster journalism of the
modern age. A demonstrated success by 1844 and used
with great effect in the Mexican War, the telegraph com-
pletely changed the whole process of reporting events and
made possible the newspaper as distinguished from the
former political and literary organ. ‘‘You are going to turn
the newspaper office upside down with your invention,” said
Horace Greeley to Morse when he witnessed a private
demonstration of the magnetic telegraph. Within a few
years, wires linked the editorial sanctum with Washington
as well as with every other section of the country ; political ©
journalism was thus decentralized.

At the same time the steady development of the power
press made possible large scale production. The London
Times was printed by steam in 1814, an event more mo-
mentous than the downfall of Napoleon the next year,
and the Hoe cylinder rotary press was installed in the
office of the Philadelphia Ledger in 1846, announcing the
triumph of the penny press. Without exaggeration it may
be said that a new era was opened in America by the estab-
lishment of the New York Sun in 1833 as a one-cent daily
paper. ‘Two years later James Gordon Bennett launched
the Herald, proclaiming at the outset his contempt for party
principles and politics—‘‘a sort of steel trap to catch the
public’ —and declaring that he would stick to the business
of gathering and reporting the news of everyday life—inter-

808 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

spersed as it happened with scandal and blackmail. It was
not long before every city, East, West and South, had its
cheap daily paper that reached far down into the lower
strata of literacy.

In another generation the increasing requirements of
capital to finance the new machinery of reporting and print-
ing were to drive from the field the independent editors of
the old school. But it was still possible at the middle of the
century for a few men, such as Samuel Bowles of the Spring-
field Republican, Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond En-
quirer, and Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times,
to maintain the personal journalism of the early days—
to make their principles and their courage count in spite
of the approaching doom of anonymity which was destined
to engulf journalism in time. It was yet possible for
Horace Greeley to own the paper which he edited and, as
he said, to ‘‘keep an ear open to the plaints of the wronged
and suffering, though they can never repay advocacy, though
those who mainly support newspapers will be annoyed
and often exposed by it; a heart as sensitive to oppression
and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced
in Brazil or Japan; a pen as ready to expose and reprove
the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed in
our own country as if they had only been committed by
Turks or Pagans in Asia some centuries ago.”’

In the technical advance of the printing and illustrating
arts, appeared a whole flock of weeklies and monthlies, lit-
erally by the hundreds, to flourish as a rule for a few
months and then pass into oblivion. Of the vast array
Godey’s Lady’s Book, founded in 1830 and continued until
long after the Civil War, reaped perhaps the richest harvest
in cash, by making a successful combination of delicate fic-
tion suited to chaste minds with tasteful articles on em-
broidery and dinner-table management. Having money
with which to pay for manuscripts, it commanded while it
lasted some of the best talent of the period to mingle with
the banalities.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 809

Of the monthlies devoted to letters, only two—Harper’s
Magazine established in 1850, and the Atlantic Monthly
floated seven years afterward—managed to survive, to-
gether with the older North American Review, the buffets
of fortune into the twentieth century. Scores of temper-
ance, religious, anti-slavery, labor, reform, scientific, and
special interest magazines borrowed and begged their way
through varying periods, long or short, throwing high upon
the neglected shelves of libraries the materials from which
in due time illuminating chapters on the social and intel-
lectual history of the United States will be written. Jour-
nalism and the lyceum were making ‘“‘adult education” a
factor in national life.

§

The social and economic conditions which so distin-
guished the middle period from the early republican era in-
evitably impressed themselves on educational institutions
and practices—conspiring to give new powers and new direc-
tion to popular learning in America, enabling this country
to lead all the world in removing the stamp of class-
rigidity, sect, and charity from the training of the masses.
England at that time still kept her universities and prepara-
tory schools far removed from the commonalty, as centers
for gentlemen who either intended to manage paternal es-
tates or enter the Church, the army, the navy, or civil
service, giving the poor almost nothing except bare rudi-
ments offered in sectarian charity schools grudgingly aided
by government doles. France, under Napoleon I, had sub-
jected education to the dominion of the state, extending the
elementary schools in the operation, and the successive gov-
ernments continued the system with modifications; but the
barriers that lay in the way of the ambitious poor had never
been destroyed. Prussia had also established a program of
class education. “The state,” said the king after his ruin
was recorded in the treaty of Tilsit, ‘“‘must replace by in-
tellectual forces the physical forces which it has lost’; but

810 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

the educational scheme was worked out on the class basis;
that is, the masses were to remain in the condition “‘pre-
scribed by Providence” while the privileged were to enjoy:
the advantages of higher education. Such was the exam-
ple set to American democracy by the older cultures of
Europe at this time. At best they offered few adventures
in intelligence—rather, scholastic devices for assuring the
privileges and pleasures of the upper classes.

Now all the circumstances of the social order in America,
especially in the North, worked against the maintenance
of the rigid lines of feudalism in the sphere of education.
In the industrial part of the United States there was no
fixed landed aristocracy; nowhere was there a clerical or
military establishment with its vested interests. With the
working class and the farmers enfranchised and enjoying
a certain economic surplus, it was impossible either to hold
them in ignorance or to keep them contented with the
charitable and ‘“‘ragged schools”’ which had come down from
colonial days.

For a nation of farmers and mechanics, bent on self-
government and possessed of the ballot, there was only one
kind of an educational program in keeping with self-respect,
namely, a free and open public school system supported by
taxation and non-sectarian in its control. Did not the
grand Jeffersonian tradition, with its respect for human
nature, require that careers should be open to talent? Did
not the republican Fathers look to education as a source of
republican strength ?

In fact, a wide array of forces combined to translate the
theory of popular education into practical achievement.
With the rise of political democracy an effective drive was
given to the demand of the idealists for public schools—
organized labor, so restive in the age of the Jacksonian up-
rising, taking a lead in demanding from the legislators the
establishment of free and equal common schools. While
the spirit of natural science was transforming the mind of
the intellectual classes and working for a secularization of

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 811

social processes, the multiplication of religious sects and
their unending rivalry speeded up the operation.
Moreover, the increasing flood of Irish and Continental
immigrants, likely to fall under Catholic direction if edu-
cated at all in charity schools, frightened Protestants of
every proclivity, making them willing to accept secularism
rather than papal authority. Finally, as Emerson viewed
it, the alarming radicalism of Jacksonian Democracy made
property owners—who had once resisted the taking of
money out of their pockets to educate the children of the
poor—more amenable to appeals for funds to support in-
stitutions for popular discipline. Thus from many angles
the problem of educating the masses was attacked when
the republic became a democracy. |
Of course the nature of the American federal system
made impossible anything like the military uniformity of
the Prussian system which was so often studied as a model.
Hence the educational movement varied in form and force
from state to state, becoming strongest naturally in the
regions where political democracy was most advanced,
namely, in the agricultural West and the industrial East.
Indeed it made the most rapid strides in the frontier
states where there were fewer vested sectarian interests
to hamper the action of government. Unquestionably, it
seems, the honor of leadership belongs to Michigan, where,
in 1817, the legislature sketched in detail on paper a full
program of education from primary school to university,
laid the foundations for common schools in 1827, and in
1837, after admission to the Union, created a university
with four departments—Literature, Science and the Arts,
Law, and Medicine. This was pioneer work in many re-
spects for all the world. Other states had established frag-
ments of such a system but none had constructed it from
pediment to capital. Nothing remained for Michigan to
do except to elaborate the details and enlarge the structure;
in 1848 it added an institution for the instruction of the
deaf, dumb, and blind; in 1855 it organized an agricultural

812 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

and industrial college; fifteen years later the doors of its
university were opened to women, thereby completing the
democracy of the scheme.

It was not easy for the older states with traditions and
vested interests to follow this radical example, because the
sects were more firmly entrenched in their midst and numer-
ous schools representing both religious convictions and eco-
nomic endowments were already in full operation. The
private academies, which had marked a forward step in
former days, now with property rights at stake themselves,
naturally resented the inroads of democracy. Where coun-
ties and towns had been empowered by state laws to raise
money through taxation for local education, the prosperous
districts had excellent schools but the backward regions
had either wretched institutions or none at all; and those
who were well provided under such a régime saw little
excuse for changes and less reason for aiding the unfor-.
tunate. Notwithstanding Emerson’s claim, many mer-
chants and farmers were reluctant to endure taxes for the
benefit of artisans and laborers; while the very notion that
girls should share in continuous educational privileges was
repugnant to respectable thinking.

Against these powerful forces the educational reformers
of the East had difficulty in making headway. In breast-
ing the current, they were forced to use even the argu-
ment of threat. ‘They pointed out to property owners the
peril that lay in an ignorant democracy just enfranchised,
proving by investigations into illiteracy how great the dan-
ger already was. They demonstrated that the peril was ris-
ing as the stream of immigrants from Europe continued to
swell; instruction in citizenship would prepare the alien
for the right use of the ballot soon to be thrust into his
hands.

Education was also offered as a panacea for every other —
ill—for pauperism and for the revolutionary distempers
imported from Old World monarchies, for the growing
radicalism among the ranks of American labor, for the

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 813

spread of socialistic and anarchistic ideas, and for the
opposition of the ignorant to the new scientific requirements
of public health. Arguments such as these were strength-
ened by events. ‘The strife among the religious sects, the
struggle of each denomination to subdue all the pupils in its
schools to its theological bias, and the resistance of parents
all combined to augment the demand for general public
schools supported by taxes and freed from clerical control.
America had not become irreligious but no one sect was
strong enough to dominate the whole terrain. And secular
instruction was the only thing on which all the sects could
agree. To these drives were added the upward thrust of
Jacksonian Democracy, determined to destroy privilege in
education as in politics and to provide ladders by which am-
bitious individuals could climb into the professions.

In the thirties and forties the educational movement be-
came a potent political force. Appropriations of money
were multiplied, the salaries of teachers were increased
to attract a better class, state supervision was introduced,
the school year was lengthened, school buildings and text-
books were improved, societies for the promotion of educa-
tion were founded, and educational journals were launched.
By the middle of the century New York, Massachusetts, and
Pennsylvania had built elementary systems on stable founda-
tions but they still left higher learning to private enter-
prise supported in the main by fees and endowments.

In New Jersey and Delaware the reformers could not
wring from the legislatures anything beyond permissive
statutes allowing districts to act. In the South no state-
wide system of public education was actually set working
before the great cataclysm of 1860. In the larger south-
ern cities—Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans,
and other centers—there were schools supported by taxa-
tion and in most of the southern states important begin-
nings were made in the creation of school funds, the enact-
ment of permissive laws, and the subsidizing of elementary
institutions for the poor. Nearly every one of them like-

814 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

wise provided a state, county, and district organization—
thus framing the skeleton structure for the future. The
most advanced in democratic sympathies, North Carolina,
had made significant experiments and even when the Union
army was at her very gates in 1863 undertook to carry out
a project for grade schools and to provide systematic train-
ing for teachers. Dominated, however, by the planting
aristocracy and removed from the main currents of science
and industrialism, the South in general was content with its
few private institutions for the upper classes and with classi-
cal instruction as the basis of collegiate learning.

Meanwhile, as was to be expected in a farmer-mechanic
democracy, advocates of agricultural and technical educa-
tion appeared on the ground. As usual, experiments were
first made with private funds. The Rensselaer Polytech-
nic, founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer, flowered
by the middle of the century into a regular engineering
college with a four-year course. Under the patronage of
the state board of agriculture, a few energetic citizens of
Pennsylvania organized in 1855 the Farmers’ High School,
which in due course became the Pennsylvania State College.
Two years after this institution opened its doors, Michigan,
as we have noted, established her Agricultural College.
About the same time the beginnings of scientific schools
were made at Harvard and Yale.

Thus the way was prepared for the great Morrill Act
of 1862, which dedicated an empire of public land to the
promotion of mechanical and agricultural education. The
spirit was already quickened when the financial support
came. Therefore, we may say that the foundations of
education in technology—the handmaid of democracy in
the conquest of the material universe—were securely laid
in the fabulous forties and the fermenting fifties. In the
same age schools of law and medicine were created by
private enterprise in many parts of the country and the
crude system of apprenticeship supplemented by opportuni-
ties for higher discipline in the classroom and laboratory.

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 815

In keeping with the humanism of the time, moreover, was
the growth of interest in the special training of defectives
and delinquents, as state institutions for the insane were
established and efforts to segregate and heal the curable
were developed into a system. Studies of the deaf, dumb,
and blind were carried on in a scientific spirit and the prepa-
ration of that class of defectives for useful work in society
was made a matter of public concern. Reform schools
with provisions for industrial education, such as the New
York House of Refuge, established in 1848, sprang up as
the movement for salvaging juvenile offenders spread far
and wide. A long stride was this from the treatment of
“sinful” children under the blue laws of colonial New
England! In the East these experiments were usually sec-
tarian and only partly sustained by state subsidies; in the
West they were as a rule carried out under official auspices
with regular grants from the public treasury.

So it may truly be said that every essential feature of
modern public education was either worked out or fairly
anticipated in the United States by the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Unquestionably the borrowings from the
Old World were immense, especially from the Prussian sys-
tem, but in every case European ideas were put through
the alembic of this democracy. Less rigid and stratified
than the European, American society gave way quicker to
the inexorable march of science and technology. With
technology triumphant it was apparent in practice that a
humble mechanic like Howe, or Richard Hoe, or Mc-
Cormick, or Hussey might become more significant than a
score of princes—nothing to boast about, just a revolution-
ary and indubitable fact. The pride of caste secreted by a
feudal order was simply inappropriate to an industrial
régime founded on applied science. Moreover, in such a
society much of the higher learning which had been evolved
in esoteric circles seemed akin to magic and occultism,
from which no small part of it undoubtedly sprang. If the
result of this natural course was the condition described

816 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

in the oft-repeated observation that “America is the best
half-educated country in the world,”’ still it could be asked
without invidious discrimination: ‘‘According to whose cri-
teria and viewed from what immovable center?’ With such
bickerings, however, the historian has no more real concern
than the biologist or physicist.

True to the processes of democracy, the educational revo-
lution of the middle period was wrought by thousands of
workers, nameless, from necessity, in the small compass of a
general treatise. And yet it would be neglecting the power-
ful element of leadership to pass over in utter silence a few
outstanding figures, for in the annals of this sphere there
are names not less worthy of place than those in science,
letters, and politics.

High in the list must be placed Horace Mann, a graduate
of Brown University, abandoning jurisprudence for ‘“‘the
larger sphere of mind and morals,’’ making the dead letter
of the Massachusetts school law live in classroom and
community intelligence, attacking child labor in factories
as a bar to education, studying the educational value of
physiology and hygiene, supporting the introduction of
music and the expulsion of the rod, patiently seeking ways
to help the defectives and delinquents, aiding women in the
contest for equal privileges in the schools, visiting Europe
in the search for germinal ideas, and finally going out to
Antioch College in the Middle West to devote his last years
to the cause of education in a virgin field.

A peer of Mann in every respect was Henry Barnard,
trained at Yale and in Germany, making, in 1835, an
American contribution to the literature of juvenile delin-
quency, establishing the first state teachers’ association in
the United States in 1845, organizing libraries with such
vigor that in every town in Rhode Island except three there
was soon a collection of five hundred volumes or more,
writing a treatise on school literature, helping to found the
American Association for the Advancement of Education,
serving as its first president in 1855, publishing the first

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC. 817

American account of the Froebel kindergarten, founding
the American Journal of Education, editing it more than a
quarter of a century, translating the writings of Comenius,
Rousseau, and Pestalozzi for the use of teachers, directing
the young University of Wisconsin, toiling in the federal bu-
reau of education—itself largely the outcome of his labors
—and closing his career at the ripe old age of eighty-nine
full of honors and appreciation, with his many monuments
standing secure against time around him. Nor must we
overlook Bronson Alcott, dreamer and humanist, who
feared the growing power of the state and chose rather to
set examples of private enterprise that nurtured wisdom
in gentleness amid wholesome physical surroundings.

In this great warfare against illiteracy and ignorance
were enlisted scores of able women, usually self-educated
and burdened with heavy domestic responsibilities, who
either fought all along the line for education or carried spe-
cial redoubts for their sex alone. Emma Willard, the six-
teenth of seventeen children, helped to refashion the whole
program of education for women. Her activities were wide
like those of her male contemporaries: she wrote texts on
universal history, astronomy, and geography, translated
Mme. de Saussure’s Progressive Education to serve in her
campaign, traveled in three years more than eight thousand
miles on packet boats, canal barges, and stages to plead the
cause before the multitudes, took her place among the pio-
neers in founding educational associations, went with Henry
Barnard to an educational conference in London to demon-
strate the new right of women to take part in public assem-
blies, and founded the Troy Seminary, forerunner of Vas-
sar by half a century.

Emma Willard’s sister, Mrs. Almira Phelps, if less
varied in her labors, was no less indefatigable in chosen
fields of education, waging the battle of science against the
classics, for women. Catherine Beecher, the eldest of Ly-
man Beecher’s thirteen children, while charged with the
care of the flock, discovered the necessity for training in

818 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

domestic science and with abounding energy promoted in-
terest in the subject by writing and lecturing upon it. To
assure continuity for her ideals and to advance the higher
professional education of her sex, she founded, in 1852,
the Woman’s Education Association.

Another dynamic daughter of New England, Mary Lyon,
starting out as a district school teacher at seventy-five cents
a week with board, rose by combining teaching and study
to a position of commanding influence in the educational
world. Early in life she vowed that she would have a
seminary for women and in spite of all the jeers at her
‘rib factory’ and her ‘‘Protestant nunnery,” she fulfilled
her pledge by laying broad and deep the foundations for
Mount Holyoke College.

After managing a publishing business in Boston and is-
suing The Dial for a season, Elizabeth Peabody, one of
Emerson’s transcendentalist group, acquired, through Mrs.
Carl Schurz, an interest in the Froebel kindergarten, and
became the dominant figure in the Froebel movement in
the United States at the inception stage. She established
an institution of her own, studied the experiment at first
hand in Germany, and then organized in the United States
a training school for kindergarten teachers in 1868. While
Miss Peabody was widening education at the base, Dorothea
Dix was humanizing philanthropy by arousing the country
to the importance of separating the incurable insane from
those that offered a promise of improvement and restora-
tion to society.

§

In no department of education was the conflict of classes
and ideals that surged through the politics of the middle
period more subtly represented than in the realm of the
higher learning, involving as a matter of course all questions
of financial support, administrative control, and curriculum
— inseparable elements of the collegiate system. In the na-
ture of things, there were only four ways of supporting an

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 819

institution for advanced instruction, namely, tuition fees—
an impossible method as long as there was any eleemosynary
competition—endowments from persons of wealth, subscrip-
tions in small sums from large religious bodies, and grants
from the public treasury.

Since the rich and well-born, particularly in the North,
were generally of the Hamilton-Webster party there was
not much likelihood of transferring to Jacksonian democ-
racy the control of the higher learning as long as it was
monopolized by private institutions. If, therefore, the
popular party was to secure an easy access to that upper
realm—and such a ladder of access was demanded by its
highly vitalized individualism—then there were only two
choices before it: the conquest of existing institutions
by legislative action and the establishment of new state
colleges supported by land grants and public revenues, bring-
ing the rich to book through the tax collector’s office.

In the end, as things turned out, there was no choice at
all, for an attempt to conquer the older colleges by political
control was defeated by Chief Justice Marshall in the cele-
brated Dartmouth College case, decided in 1819—a spec-
tacular event more important in American educational
history than the founding of any single institution of higher
learning. By securing the boards of trustees of endowed
educational institutions against political interference, the
Dartmouth decision in effect decreed that a large part of
the terrain of the higher learning should be forever occupied
and controlled by private corporations composed of citizens
empowered to select their own successors, collect and dis-
burse money, choose presidents and professors, and more
or less directly determine the letter and spirit of the
curriculum.

In the story of that famous lawsuit are revealed entertain-
ing phases of the economics and politics of the period.
Dartmouth College was founded in the reign of King
George III by a royal charter and was managed by a
small self-perpetuating board of trustees, fashioned on the

820 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

model of the trading corporation. In the natural course
of things the board passed into the control of stanch Fed-
eralists who adhered to the ways of their party. But with
the uprush of Jeffersonian Democracy discontent appeared
in the state of New Hampshire and also in the college.
Under the pressure of the new forces, a Democratic legis-
lature and governor attempted a conquest of the college by
changing it into a university, enlarging the board of trustees,
adding a number of political appointees, and in effect trans-
forming it into a state institution.

Not to be outdone by this Jeffersonian maneuver, the
Federalist faction began to fight the state legislature
through the courts of law, carrying the case finally to the
Supreme Court at Washington, where that loyal Fed-
eralist, John Marshall, still held the wheel, with failing grip,
it is true, but yet powerfully. Very astutely, the old board
of trustees engaged as its counsel Daniel Webster, that
formidable opponent of everything Jeffersonian, to wage
its judicial battle. When the case was tried at the state
court in Exeter, Webster made the first of his sentimental
speeches, introducing into a purely legal argument, as Rufus
Choate said, a “pathos” that hardly seemed “‘in good taste.”

Before the Supreme Court in Washington, Webster re-
sorted to the same tactics, suffusing and crowning his legal
argument with shrewd appeals to Federalist emotions and
word-patterns, none of which was lost on Marshall, who
hated Jefferson and all his works with an almost immeasur-
able intensity. Marshall was easily convinced, but at first,
it appears, a majority of the Court, now coming steadily
under current influence through judicious appointments, was
against Webster and the old board of trustees. Discreet,
as well as valorous, Marshall postponed the decision until
his colleagues could be brought around to his views. When
at length the decision was reached, it was announced that
the charter granted by King George to the college was a
contract; that the obligation of the contract was trans-
ferred to the state at the time of the Revolution; and that

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 821

under the federal Constitution the state legislature could
not “impair” its binding force. In short, there was to be
no political interference with educational companies.

The way was thus definitely cleared for the development
of control over the higher learning in America. Private
corporations—usually religious in origins, for skeptics sel-
dom endowed colleges—were free to go on with their his-
toric mission secure from popular storms. Under the
protection of the Dartmouth doctrine, established colleges,
such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, continued, gathering
in slowly, very slowly, gifts of money to augment their
meager endowments. And under the same egis, the reli-
gious sects, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and all the
others, founded new colleges in the East and South—and
all over the West as the frontier advanced toward the
setting sun—small colleges usually, poorly endowed, mainly
sustained by tuition fees and subscriptions of the faithful,
theological in spirit, and generally managed by clergymen of
the denomination, the most active and interested parties
to the undertakings.

Running parallel with this development, nevertheless,
was the growth of state colleges and universities in the
South and West; a slow growth owing to the competition
of private and sectarian colleges and the unwillingness of
farmers to tax themselves heavily for the support of higher
learning. If any one of these institutions is to be singled
out for comment it must be the University of Virginia, in-
spired by Thomas Jefferson and opened in 1825, the year
before his death. Created by the state legislature and goy-
erned by a board of visitors appointed by the governor and
council, freed, in theory though not in fact, from sectarian
control, and reflecting the spirit of its founder, this univer-
sity broke from the classical traditions of the original semi-
theological institutions, provided a broad curriculum, and
permitted students to elect their course from among eight
programs: ancient languages, modern languages, mathe-
matics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, chemistry,

822 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

medicine, and law. To assure instruction of the highest
grade, Jefferson selected the best professors he could find
at home or abroad to fill the first chairs, setting a noble
example to his successors, especially to the small sectarian
colleges where denominational orthodoxy, rather than high
competence, was the prime consideration.

Yet, notable as Jefferson’s experiment was, it received
small tribute from the organizers of public institutions in
other states, even in the West in the days of triumphant
Jacksonian Democracy, partly, perhaps, on account of cleri-
cal influences, the prevalence of New England traditions
among the upper classes, and in the later period at least
the influx of Prussian concepts of university organization,
such, for example, as were adopted in the case of Michigan
University, opened in 1841. After all it was not surpris-
ing that the democracy of the age found expression slowly
in the higher learning—as in the upper ranges of judicial
control.

With respect to curricula, the advocates of science and
humanistic subjects were able to make only a few inroads
upon the classical monopoly handed down from time im-
memorial. Clerical control in the old and new private
colleges assured close adherence to Greek, Latin, logic, and
moral philosophy; and the new state institutions, even Jef-
ferson’s defiant University of Virginia, could not escape the
denominational drive on boards of trustees. Still, shel-
tered as they were from the wind and the rain, the colleges
could not evade entirely the impact of worldly interests
less subtly utilitarian than theology, law, and medicine.

Steadily, if gradually, science, called by a critic ‘‘the reli-
gion of modern industry,’ made headway in collegiate
curricula, culminating near the close of the period in the
establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard,
endowed by Webster’s great friend and patron, Abbot Law-
rence, and the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, with the
financial assistance of Joseph Sheffield, a rich merchant, one
of the charter members of the New York and New Haven

DEMOCRACY: ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC 823

Railway Company. In keeping with the growing recogni-
tion accorded to science was a rising appreciation of politi-
cal economy and modern languages. Between 1820 and
1835, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton,
and Williams added the study of mercantile and business
affairs to the respectable themes inherited from the landed
clergy of medieval times, forecasting a time when “‘eco-
nomics”? was to become a favorite topic of instruction and
learning.

With the drift of American students to Germany—a
drift indicated by figures showing four of them in German
universities in 1835 and seventy-seven in 1860—and their
return to assume places of leadership in American univer-
sity life, the secular and critical trend already evident in
academic disciplines was accelerated, marking there as every-
where in culture the all-devouring operation of practical and
earthly concerns.

§

However heavy were the borrowings of America from
Europe, her political institutions, social customs, and intel-
lectual development arrested the thought of those philoso-
phers of the Old World who were trying to cast horoscopes
of the future. ‘The machine process was marching with
seven league boots upon the already straggling ranks of
peasants, feudal lords, and clergy. And all who stood
upon the watchtower—those who faced to-morrow in con-
fidence and those who filled the hours with lamentations—
had to take note even of that Jacksonian democracy which
the British Foreign Quarterly called “horn-handed and pig-
headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous .. .
with an incredible genius for lying.”

Like locusts a host of travelers descended upon the land
and those given to literary expression wrote volumes on
every phase of American life. And when their reflections
and strictures were all thoroughly sifted, it was made ap-
parent that both critics and friends of American institu-

824 THE RISE OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

tions were addressing themselves to groups and classes in
their native lands rather than to the experimenters on this
side of the water. Every chapter of de Tocqueville’s de-
mocracy in America mirrored his own political moods and
bore a relation to the political currents in which he floated
in France. The same was true of Harriet Martineau’s vol-
ume on American society written in the midst of Jackson’s
triumphant career as President. Bringigg to her travels
in the United States a liberal and humanitarian mind, she
saw clearest those phases of American life most directly
tangent to the matters she was interested in at home. “Not
by aggression,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, “‘but by the
naked fact of existence we are an eternal danger and an
unsleeping threat to every government that founds itself
on anything but the will of the governed.”’ As Maitland
long afterward exclaimed in another connection: ‘‘Such is
the unity of all history.”

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